


Accretion

by KLaxAddict



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Dream Sex, Drunk Sex, Lack of Communication, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Telepathic Bond, Unhealthy Dynamics, dream-sharing, unintentional gaslighting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-06 04:18:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15878379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KLaxAddict/pseuds/KLaxAddict
Summary: Accretion: (noun). The accumulation of particles into a massive object via an Accretion Disk, causing matter to spiral inward towards the central body. The process by which all galaxies, stars, and planets are formed.A Rick and Morty Soulmate AU





	1. Binary Stars

**Binary Stars:** A star system consisting of two stars, orbiting around a common gravitational center of mass. Binary stars are believed to compose the majority of star systems in the visible universe.

 

* * *

 

Morty’s feet kick idly back and forth over the geometric green patterns of the waiting room carpet. Red dashes dart through it at odd angles, like tongues protruding from lizards’ mouths.

He’d been trying to draw the lizards with his crayons and drawing pad, but the room has started to go spinny again, the shapes and tongues on the floor refusing to stay where they are, rolling and twisting about the floor in odd, lumbering movements. It’s making the boy slightly nauseous, but he knows if he closes his eyes the colors and patterns will only get worse, and he’ll either puke all over himself in public again, making everyone upset, or he’ll get lost the colors and not come back for hours.

He doesn’t mind the latter option, it’s like watching a movie or having a really good dream, but that upsets mom and dad too. So instead he just sets his drawing aside and watches as his feet kick through the moving shapes that swirl around his ankles, waiting for his parents to finish their discussion with the doctor behind the door.

Morty doesn’t mind this doctor, she’s nicer to him than some of the others. She lets him play with toys and draw while she asks him the same questions all the others have, about why he can’t pay attention in school or when people talk to him, why he has the nightmares that make him wake up screaming and unable to explain what he sees, why he falls asleep in class, why he sees funny colors and shapes and sometimes can’t walk or speak right, upsetting everyone around him.

She doesn’t accuse him of making it up for attention, doesn’t ask him weird questions about how his parents treat him, doesn’t shove things in his eyes or ears or ask him to do lots of stupid dances to show off his balance.

She did ask to see his pictures though, and Morty was happy to show her. He draws a lot, pictures of outer space and monsters, places that only exist in his head with red grass and purple skies, spaceships and stars and nebulae.

The doctor had laughed at him when he said the word ‘nebulae’, which had made him annoyed. He’d used it correctly, pronounced it right and everything. She’d said she was just impressed to hear it coming from someone his age, and he’d shrugged. Sometimes he knew things. Like the fact that more than one gas cloud formed by a supernova were called ‘nebulae’, not nebula or ‘nebulas’.

She’d agreed with him, and told him he was absolutely right, and let him keep drawing in silence until his parents had come to pick him up. Morty isn’t sure how long ago that was. His sense of time goes funny when things move like this. Behind the door he can hear Mom and Dad’s voices getting louder, higher, they way they do when they’re upset about him, or at him a lot.

When the door doesn’t open after what feels like a few more minutes, Morty gives up and lets his eyes slip closed, letting the kaleidoscope of colors take him away from the yelling behind the door and the lizards on the carpet.

They’re going to be upset anyway.

Behind the door Beth and Jerry smith are indeed upset as they talk to the latest specialist in child behavioral development, confirming the diagnosis they’ve heard before: Early-Onset Bond Syndrome.

As soon as the pediatricians and child psychologists they’d been using saw the patchy grey soulmark beginning to develop on Morty’s arm, they’d dropped the case like the boy had the plague, all referring the Smiths on until they’d arrived here.

“As you have probably heard from the initial diagnosis,” Dr. Newman continues over their protests. “EBS is usually the result of a soulmate that is older by at least a decade or two.”

“Look, I’m a doctor too,” Beth interrupts, “And none of the research on EBS mentions anything like-”

“Beth,” Jerry puts a hand on her arm, plaintively. “Look, if she can fix him then… just let her do what she needs to do.” He turns back to Dr. Newman, “Is it drugs?”

The Doctor smiles thinly. “Yes and no, if I may continue?”

Crossing her arms, Beth tugs free of Jerry’s grip and nods tersely.

“In most cases, soulmate bonding begins at puberty, when hormonal changes begin the process of developing bond marking. In cases of EBS, one partner has hit puberty well before the other, but the bond developing is strong enough to encourage early puberty changes.”

She looked down at the chart on her desk.

“I understand he’s become interested in self-stimulation the last few months?”

“Little bastard won’t stop humping anything that’s not nailed down,” Jerry mutters, receiving a sharp glare and kick in the shins from his wife.

“Ow. What, you have to live with him too, you know I’m right.”

“That’s our eight year old son, Jerry!”

“I know, that’s why it’s creepy!”

“It’s actually very normal in younger children,” Dr. Newman assures them calmly. “But in conjunction with the other symptoms I think you should expect an early development in a few ways.”

She suppresses a slight grin as Jerry rubs his shin. “A conversation about private time and boundaries is probably a good place to start.”

Continuing, the pages in Morty’s medical history continue to flip across the desk. “As the neurochemical bond develops, the older partner will often unintentionally become the dominant personality, exerting unconscious influence on the younger bondmate through the bond.”

Jerry frowns, trying to translate. “So what, a couple dreams?”

“Drugs.” Beth stares at the doctor, comprehending with slow horror. “You’re telling me my grade-school son is fucked up all the time because his goddamn bondmate is off getting drunk and high?”

Dr. Newman nods. “Yes, most likely a bit of teenage rebellion when their soulmate mark didn’t develop at the same time as their peers. It won’t until Morty develops further into natural puberty, hurried or not.”

“So what do we do?” Jerry asks. “Our son is a drunk pervert who’s failing the second grade for the second time, you have to do _something_.”

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”

“There’s bond-blockers out there, just throw him on one of those,” Beth says angrily.

“Those aren’t approved for children, and even if-”

“I don’t really give a fuck, you’re telling me that’ll fix him.”

“And if even they were,” Dr. Newman continues coolly, “This isn’t your standard case of EBS.”

Suspiciously, Beth eyes the doctor. “What do you mean, ‘not standard’.”

“Morty’s symptoms are far more severe than the standard EBS patients I see. They’re inhibiting his development on a level that’s only been documented a few times in the past century.”

“You just said everything he was experiencing was normal!”

“A standard EBS case study might have a few nightmares before age thirteen, maybe have a case of nausea once or twice after their future bondmate has a rough night. Morty is experiencing symptoms on a near daily basis that I only see increasing as he ages.”

“What does that mean?” Beth asks, knuckles going white on the arm of her chair.

“It means that Morty has an exceptionally strong bond. They’re a very close match.”

“Well that’s good,” Jerry interjects. “That means it’s true love, right? All they have to do is find each other.”

“She doesn’t mean close _emotionally_ , Jerry,” Beth says, speaking through gritted teeth. “She means genetically.”

Dr. Newman nods.

Jerry looks confused.

“Does Morty have any aunts or uncles? Maybe first cousins?”

The color slowly drains from Jerry’s face to match his wife’s. “Oh god.”

“This is your fucking family,” Beth speaks in a low and furious tone, turning to face her husband. “Your goddamn parents just got a _third_ , that’s the kind of shit that breeds this… this…”

“This kind of anomaly is rare, but it has been documented several times,” the doctor cuts her off. “Traditionally leading to healthy, loving bonds. But with the severity of Morty’s symptoms at the moment, I am concerned about having them meet.”

“God yes, that’s disgusting,” Jerry mutters, still looking shocked.

“No,” Dr. Newman sighs. “Traditionally these anomalies have occurred between siblings, and they still result in exceptionally strong bonds. But with the addition of Morty’s EBS, I am concerned that he may never be able to develop normally with the excessive influence of the older partner, especially if it’s solidified too soon.”

The rest of the meeting passes in a blur of passed resources and promises to schedule follow-up appointments.

Eventually, the door to the waiting room creaks open, and the Smiths collect their son. Beth picking up his drawing pad and crayons, and Jerry picks him up warily, his eyes closed as he blissfully chases the colors that dance through his waking dreams.

 

* * *

 

_Darkness is the natural state of the universe._

_It shoves the minuscule collection of matter that makes its ludicrous attempts to fill the vastness of the universe aside and collects it together into galactic superclusters._

_It decorates itself with a shining collection of fusion and heavy elements, shimmering with heat, only drawing attention back to the infinitesimal impact it manages to make on the void around it._

_The dark pulses and breathes through the void, as if refusing to allow itself to be defined by the mere absence of light._

_It existed before the Big Bang, and the dark still maintains its confident hold, even within that fraction of the universe where light has managed to creep its way across its face in the ensuing 13.8 billion years._

_That steady crawl of light brings with it the concept of time as galaxies spin and crash all around him, reforming and breaking apart as they cannibalize each other in their constant gravitational fight to hold importance against the blackness that birthed them._

_The realization of a self, an ego, comes quickly after, as he understands he is observing the universe around him, within which he also exists._

_And as an observer, he must therefore have a form to observe with, most likely with eyes and a body of some type._

_At this deduction he feels a body, his body, precipitate out of the nothingness of space, identifying boundaries to his existence where there had been none before._

_He looks down, and recognizes it as his own. He recognizes its smallness and frailty as ‘something’ against the immensity of the nothingness around him, and even against the ultimate insignificance of the galaxies spiraling above and below._

_He finds peace in the fear that comes with this understanding of the sublime, and he revels in it._

_A mere moment, or maybe an eternity later, he’s uncertain again, he feels the hairs on the back of his newly discovered neck begin to stand on edge, and the unmistakable feeling that he is not alone._

_Limited by his newfound form, he is unable to face it. But he knows, with irrational, inexplicable certainty then, that there is a presence behind him. Another observer._

_Even if he were able to contort his body through the vacuum of space towards it, he’s certain he wouldn’t be able to perceive it. The Other, if it has a form, would be unknowable to him. It would be a dark chasm from which no visible light would emerge, a void far emptier and more terrifying than the one that has, until now, seemed content to cradle him._

_Rick is suddenly aware that he’s freezing._

_That he cannot breathe._

_That his body, is only a frail, pathetic lump of accumulated carbon and a few other compounds shed by stars upon their explosive deaths._

_That his very existence is a reminder that even those few bright spots swirling in the darkness cannot survive for long in the cruel, uncaring environment he has found himself inhabiting._

_He opens his mouth to scream and finds only silence, swallowed quickly as the void rushes in to fill his lungs with vacuum._

_Behind him, the Other watches._

 

* * *

 

A scream pierces the empty street, mingling with and overpowering the buzz of the streetlamp that lights it, blood-curdling in its authenticity.

It’s a primal, unpreventable expression of dread that is no longer looming, and of inescapable fears. A cry designed not to plead for assistance, but as pure warning to any other unfortunate creatures nearby to flee, to save themselves while they still can, _if_ they still can.

The sound is unearthly in the way it shatters the heavy quiet of the small hours of the suburban morning, winding its way through hedges and double-glazed windows in a frantic attempt to escape the terrors that have given birth to it.

But the most unnatural thing about the sound is the silence that follows it.

All along the street, shades remain lowered, and lights remain dark. Not even the lone screech of a cat or howl of a chained dog responds to this near-nightly occurrence.

Bodies turn in beds, burying their heads under pillows, ignoring the instincts carefully instilled in their hindbrains by millennia of evolution, flooding their nervous systems and telling them to _run_ …

But it’s just the boy who cries Lovecraftian wolf, the reason their property value has taken a tank in the last five years. He’ll shut up in a minute.

Sure enough the sound ends, a few seconds, an eternity later, and earplugs are tightened and white noise machines cranked up, as people try to will the adrenaline and cortisol from their systems and remind themselves that at least the in-laws don’t ask to spend the night when they come to town anymore.

Morty pushes himself up in his bed, his breath coming in rapid, shaking gasps as his feet scrabble to kick the comforter off his legs.

Already he’s automatically pushing himself back into the corner of the wall, blindly grabbing at the cheap wooden frame of his headboard for something to cling to. Thin gouges in the particleboard show the impressions of his fingernails from past nights, sloppily spray-painted over. Sweat curls on his forehead and drips down the back of his neck, making his pajama top stick to his back where it’s rucked up against the wall.

The boy’s eyes are wild and unblinking in the darkness as he surveys his room, trying to reassure himself of his surroundings, his lips moving slightly without thought as he lists the items in the room and their placement.

_Bed, Nightstand, Desk, Carpet, Bookshelf, Closet, Chair..._

Nothing missing, nothing new. All shadows present and accounted for.

He checks the clock above his desk, blinking for the first time at the glow of the digital display as his breathing begins to even and slow.

2:17 AM.

There are nineteen plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling that never charge enough to glow evenly, because his dad hadn’t been able to figure out how to install ceiling lights in this room when they’d moved in.

His name is Morty Smith. It’s 2:17 AM on a Saturday night in mid-April. He’s alone in his bedroom, and he is as safe as possible.

The stain on the carpet by his desk that looks like blood is from Dr. Pibb he’d spilled when trying to use it for lava a volcano science project that he’d gotten a C- on even though he’d never turned it in because his 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Kelly was just happy he’d paid attention during science class enough to get that far.

Morty’s in the process of counting the electrical sockets when the door to his bedroom slams open. He jumps fractionally, his eyes whipping towards the door even as the rest of him stays frozen in place, fingernails curling paint from the post beneath his fingers.

The hallway remains dark as a pale hand slides through and gropes for the light switch, instantly flooding the room in blotchy yellow light, and Morty’s mother stumbles through the open door like a moth to the flame.

Relaxing, Morty lets go of the bedframe and scoots cautiously down the mattress to swing his legs off the side, putting on the smile he knows is slightly crooked by default and wiping his clammy hands across his knees.

Beth is still blinking at the offending 60 watt bulb in the floor lamp she’s awoken, swaying unsteadily just inside the doorway. She barely seems to notice Morty, the reason she’s ostensibly here, but her shirt has the telltale crease it only gets from a torso folded across the kitchen table.

He must have woken her from downstairs then. Only 2 am on a weekend, that isn’t so late for her.

Clearing his throat a little, Morty utters the first sound he’s made since screaming himself awake, hoping to strike something approaching a normal octave and key.

“H-Hi mom.”

Close enough.

It helps to focus her, at least, and she turns to approximate a smile at him as well before collapsing next to him on the bed.

Morty hopes she doesn’t fall asleep here again. He used to encourage it, when he was younger and had the nightmares, but now it’s just awkward. And more than a little sad for both of them.

“Hey, Morty. I was just- just coming to see you. How’s the…?”

She makes an ambiguous gesture with her hand at her head, the one she always uses when she doesn’t want to articulate Morty’s ‘ _condition_ ’, something that tries, for its part, to avoid being the international sign for ‘cuckoo’ and instead comes away as something between an old-timey radio operator tuning for a signal and a stage magician pantomiming mentalist powers.

“Oh, y’know, n-not so bad,” Morty gets out, picking at his cuff and avoiding his mother’s face as he automatically gives the standard response. “J-just a nightmare. I’ll probably grow out of them soon, l-like dad says.”

Beth doesn’t respond to that like she usually does, either with a scathing endorsement of her  _fellow medical professionals_ against her husband’s opinion, or in a tired agreement with the denial of Morty’s growing night terrors, and accompanying increasing attention and focus issues.

For a moment, Morty thinks she might have passed out after all, but before he can bring himself to check, she shifts on the bed beside him and nods at his arm, where he’s been absently rubbing at the blotchy mark on his right arm through the sweat-stained fabric.

“How’s it looking?”

Taken a bit off-guard at the unexpected interest, he quietly slides his sleeve up and turns his arm towards the dim light. Frowning, Beth takes his wrist and pulls it closer, holding it close as she squints to clear the doubling effects of the wine.

“Oh, it’s clearer now.”

Nodding, Morty resists the urge to tug his sleeve back down or cover the mark with his palm. He’s long grown used to the scrutiny of fluorescent lights and nitrile gloves in doctor’s offices, but this seems more invasive, more intimate. Especially when…

“I-I was able to-to pick out the first name last week,” Morty admits, not meeting his mother’s eyes when she looks up from the newest iteration of his mark to stare at him. “I haven’t told anybody yet.”

Letting go of his arm, Beth sits back, assessing him more soberly than she seems to have a moment before.

“Twelve is… very young for that, Morty.”

Morty nods, and gives in to the urge to pull his arm back, tucking the four rough but fuzzy letters safely against his chest.

“I know. But I think maybe…” He hesitates, not used to having this level of razor-sharp attention focused on him, even during the daylight hours. It’s making him nervous. “I think maybe it’s a good sign? L-like good luck.”

He’s expecting mockery, or at least dismissal, but when she speaks his mom’s voice is quiet, but serious.

“It was my father’s name, Morty. So I think it’s definitely good luck.”

 

* * *

 

All dimensions have their peculiarities and peccadillos, the small things that made the infinite majority of the multiverse wrinkle their nose with their own mixtures of confusion, envy, or distaste. But because of that fantastic spectrum of variation, no one universe in a million can stand on its own and declare itself truly unique among all others.

Sure, you may be the universe where lightning bugs developed with actual light bulbs in their asses and Paris Hilton became the universally acclaimed prime minister of Germany, but so what? A dozen other universes have the same schtick, only some guy named Gary in Buffalo, New York chose a slightly different tie back in 1989.

Rick Sanchez of Earth Dimension S-491 lies back on the heart shaped bed, smoking a cigarette he found crushed in the bottom of his pockets and staring at the mirrored surface of the ceiling. Same shit, different dimension. It would be a lot more comfortable if the bed had been shaped like a human heart, honestly, but he’s a good seventy-odd star systems away from the next bipedal species, it would be in poor taste to complain. Just another tiny kick in the nards from life, the grand dame bitch herself. He’s had worse.

Managing to bust his way out of Earth’s orbit in a ship he’d spent half his life and all of the college scholarship money he’d scrounged up on was a victory unlike any he’d previously known. Finding out the rest of the galaxy, maybe even the universe was just as fixated on soulmates as the stupid ball of dirt he’d left behind was a sucker-punch he’d never seen coming.

Figuring out interdimensional travel was next, and whole new infinities opening up to him, giving him another escape was next. Almost immediately that was followed by discovering that he was right: most of infinity was blissfully more concerned with things that had nothing to do with soulmate marks, neurochemical bonding, and the other prattle that had half-fueled Rick’s quest to get away from the miserable species that had spat him out.

And then he met the first other version of himself. And found out the inane claim to fame for his dimension is roughly the same as all the other S-400 Earth dimensions. All bundled up, categorized, and slapped with the ‘soulmate universe’ identifier.

At least the other Rick didn’t pity him. Not for the blank patch on his forearms that Rick has spent a lifetime covering with long sleeves and lab coats to avoid the stupid fucking sympathetic looks and suspicious stares.

All he got was a “That sounds like serious bullshit,” and a description of the giant, parasitic slugs that roamed the streets of Mexico when that Rick was a kid, defining his own universe’s place on the central finite curve.

But he spends enough time with other versions of himself over the next few decades to recognize their own brand of hostility and suspicion that seeps into his face when he outs his dimension number. Disgust, disdain, and a dash of pity. Not for what he lacks, but for the bad luck of the draw to be born into such a ridiculous system, like a Rick with three heads and no genitals.

Eventually he stops visiting the Citadel, stops visiting other Earth dimensions except to pick up reading material now and then. Turns out most of the classics are much more readable without soulmates at every turn, even ‘Romeo & Juliet’ is halfway decent with a real point to make. But the one that lost the most in translation has to be Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’.

In this version, Rick finds, Frankenstein is tormented by his own mind and the horror of what he’s done, rather than the gaping ‘incompleteness’ of his creature. And the creature itself is free of any madness that comes of being sewn from a dead man’s arm, the name of soulmate that is not his own burned into his flesh.

But the creature still compels Frankenstein to build him a partner. A mate to flee the cruelties and indignities of the world with, to turn their backs on the civilized world and system and live in their own monstrous differences. When Frankenstein denies him, the creature swears vengeance on his creator, promising to use all the gifts endowed to him to end the inequities and indignities of his life.

Rick tries not to think about that on the mornings he wakes up on top of sloppily constructed neutrino bombs, quotes from the book painted on the sides in sloppy block letters like the ones he’d scratched on helmets and gear in the goddamn Vietnamese jungle, years ago. He keeps a paperback of the book stashed under the seat of his ship like a teenager with his first porno mag, the spine cracked white from use.

He’s distracted from his dismal line of thought when a presence appears at the door of the room. Rick stubs out his cigarette on the stone wall beside the bed and eyes his companion for the evening.

“Caliverthe, you sexy thing. Get over here and tell me how my favorite invertebrate in the galaxy’s breaking hearts this week.”

Invitingly soft and curving, Xytolians evolved from mollusks a few millennia ago, and the combination of amoeba-like elasticity, a nice pink hue that always makes them look freshly flushed, and absolutely mind-blowing suction skills makes them one of Rick’s favorite species in existence.

“You’re a charmer as always, Rick Sanchez,” the creature teases, slipping fluidly into his lap and running a tentacle across his hair and down the back of his neck. “You bony old fuck.”

Grinning, Rick buries his hands in xer sides, massaging deeply at the sliding layers of powerful muscle.

“You’ll succeed in melting my spine one of these days, baby. Just do what you did last time.”

The room with the ‘heart’-shaped bed belongs to a brothel, a little higher end than Rick’s usual fare, and a lot more expensive, but it’s worth it for more than just Cal’s delightful company. There’s no neon sign outside the door, no advertisements posted for it anywhere obvious, but to those in the know this club specializes in a specific type of clientele: not just the unbonded, but the unmarked.

In a universe where bonds begin to develop with the onset of puberty, and marks begin to appear around age fifteen or sixteen in humans, those who don’t have a mark by age twenty are patted on the back and declared ‘a late bloomer’. Those who don’t have one by twenty-five receive sympathetic advice to keep their chin up. Anyone who doesn’t have one by age thirty will at best receive a wink and a lascivious grin, a jovial ‘well you’re a cradle robber, ain’t you’ thrown at them across a bar or a water cooler. And after that, the jokes and advice, the encouragement to be ‘patient’ cease.

The sympathy remains, miserably sweet and unwanted, mixing horribly with the pity facing someone with a horrific deformity. ‘The Unmarked’. The same refrain running through the mind of everyone who sees it.

_There, but for the grace of God, go I._

People whisper to their children on the street, caught staring a little more blatantly than the parents. Be nice to them. Their soulmate died in infancy. Their soulmate died before they came of age. You’ve been effectively widowed for life before your first beer, and unable to accept it until you drink yourself into an early grave.

But more common than the sympathy, more common than pity, is the revulsion. The confusion, the fear, the whispers and bigoted bullshit that gets ground in at every age.

The unmarked are sociopaths. They’re incapable of love. Not a single person  in the world could love them unabashedly. They’re rapists. They’re murderers. There’s nothing for them here, why would they, could they, care? The 0.2% of the population that has no mark by 45 makes up more than a quarter of the maximum security prison population on Earth.

Rick gets that. If they could catch or hold him, he’d probably be in there too. Why bother to cling to a system that has no respect for you.

But long sleeves and self-imposed isolation only do so much when you’re trying to fuck your way across the multiverse. He’s always found it bizarre that people end up more concerned about fucking him if they strip him naked and _don’t_ find someone else’s claim branded across his body. What a bunch of hypocrites.

Still, some days when he’s a little more flush than usual, and a lot less willing to put up with the effort of getting someone’s pants off while they try to sneak desperate, often hopeful glances at his skin. Getting his partner past the level of arousal where disgust snaps off entirely for half an hour isn’t too hard, he’s readily willing to admit that, but the creeping sense of shame and godawful pity that creeps back into their faces and the tension in their limbs after the deed is done ruins his fucking afterglow.

So he ends up here. An establishment run for people like him, and staffed entirely by unbonded workers who keep their opinions to themselves for the length of an hour or five.

Cal’s talented mouth wraps around his earlobe, displaying that impressive array of suction as amorphous hands run up and down his back, sliding down to squeeze firmly at his ass. Not to be outdone, Rick deploys a couple of his own tricks, curling his tongue around a valve and smirking at the hitch that comes to xer breathing. Lingering stresses and old grievances fade away as he finds himself nearly enveloped in soft, pink flesh, massaging him gently from head to toe.

Groaning, he lets his head fall back as his partner takes the lead.

“Tell me Rick,” the low, throaty voice trills around him, as his shirt falls away to join his coat on the floor.

“Do you still miss not having a soulmate?”

Rick’s eyes snap open to find Cal’s and he forcibly shoves the sex worker off of him, sitting up and eyeing xer.

“What the fuck is going on.”

That question isn’t just against the rules, it’s taboo. Sacred to the fundamental promise of this pathetic place full of a sorry hodgepodge of misfits and outcasts.

Caliverthe’s eyes are bright and shining, xer whole body more flushed than Rick remembers it being the last time he’d visited.

It must have taken one hell of a hit before xer shift to get to this level of fucked up, anyone else might have stormed out to have xer job by now. Rick’s buzz might be fucked now, but if xe’s still holding he’ll be willing to overlook it.

“I just meant,” the alien continues, a little apologetically but with manic light still bursting from every cell. “You’re a genius, right Rick?”

‘Yeah, so what,” he says flatly, already anticipating the next line of questioning and reaching for his coat. Maybe he has another cigarette stashed in one of the pockets.

“Can’t you just… well… you know...”

Rick knows. The biochemical nature of bonds is somewhat understood, but not entirely. Like genetics or physics or any of the other real sciences, no grand unified theory yet exists, new information overturning old every decade or three.

Rick remembers the basics from high school sex ed class, the same stuff he’d learned from a decade of Hollywood and rumors under the bleachers boiled down to an inexact science.

Bonds are neurochemical in nature. This allows state-sharing for things like dreams and emotional communication. Bonds seek out an appropriate mate and settle in four stages. Stage one is marking. Then identification, with marked individuals coming in close enough proximity for the bond to identify its previously marked target and lock on fully. Stage three is first contact: the first kiss in old wedding traditions, the accidental ‘bump into each other on a crowded street’ in modern first-world countries. That creates a more stable, open connection for better exchange of chemicals, quickly followed by stage-four, euphemistically called the ‘prolonged contact’ phase. Fucking for hours, most often, but technically it was accurate, any kind of extended and extensive skin-to-skin contact would do to stabilize the bond and leave the neurochemical pathways in their final, open configuration.

The loss of two individuals to become a cohesive whole. Like the covalent bonding of atoms to share electrons, never able to split apart as they were before. Something greater than the sum of its parts, if you believed the most of the population.

That was about the limit of scientific knowledge on bonding. Why bonds chose certain individuals, often hundreds if not thousands of miles apart or years different in age, why some never developed bonds at all and the nitty-gritty of how state-sharing actually worked, those were all questions for the ages. Questions that allowed the majority of the universe to romanticize and mysticize ‘soulmate’ bonding, even as parts of it were held up to the light little by little.

Questions Rick knows he could probably solve in a year if he wanted to. He’s solved harder problems before. But he knows he, and any other Rick he’s ever met, never will.

Bonding, like anything else, isn’t magic. It’s a genetic lottery, one he’s been lucky enough not to be burdened with losing. Soulmates don’t make you better, they sand off the edges and make you less than you were, a blending into mediocrity with whatever hormonally compatible breeding partner is plucked out of the aether.

Beyond being a waste of his time, and completely uninteresting, he’d never share it with anyone if he did crack it. The unmarked scientist who solved the mysteries of soulmate bonding. It sounds like the tagline for a goddamn Lifetime Original Movie.

_‘The only heart he could not heal was his own.’_

“No.” He snaps, cutting off the conversation before it can go any further. “Knock this shit off, Cal, or I’ll tell the front desk you can’t hack it any longer.”

Annoyed at himself for giving in to such a lazy and obvious threat, Rick climbs off the bed and starts to head for the small bar along the wall, hoping Cal will take a hint and get back to the far more enjoyable things they could be doing.

The unmistakable sound of a laser pistol charging behind him stops him in his tracks.

Turning slowly, Rick sees another Xytolian standing in the doorway, smaller and paler than Cal, but with the same bright-eyed mania pouring from its eyes.

Fuck. Not drugs then. The lingering endorphin high of a new and quickly formed bonding.

Bond Madness.

The little fucker in the door points the pistol at Rick’s head, but he’s too busy staring adoringly at Caliverthe to focus on his aim. Cursing under his breath, Rick tucks and rolls for the his own gun, stashed in his coat pocket, puddled by the bed.

Cal moves first, tackling his legs and taking him out at the knees as he scrabbles for his coat, the same strong muscles he’d been enjoying a few minutes ago being ruthlessly used against him. Xer partner hasn’t even moved from the doorframe yet, there’s no doubt who the dominant partner in this short-lived bond is going to be. Rick can’t reach his gun, but manages to wrap his fingers around a taser patch. Wincing as he looks down at the firm point of contact Cal has around his waist, he takes a gamble and throws the disk at his other attacker, watching it unfurl as it crosses the room and buries in pale flesh, dispensing hundreds of volts of electric shock.

Caliverthe shrieks like the shock has run through xer own system, immediately releasing Rick and crawling across the floor to xer bondmate, sobbing shakily and cradling the smaller form as it shakes.

“It’s not what you think, Rick."

Rick is already pulling on his coat and running his fingers through his hair, huffing out a laugh as he pulls out his own gun. Alarms are already sounding in the hallway, and he can the sound of feet hurrying towards his room.

“No? Let me take a guess,” Rick sneers. “Newly bonded, desperate for cash so you can spend every remaining moment wrapped up in yourselves, you decide to rob and kill an unmarked old rube.”

Cal has managed to pull the disc from xer partner’s skin as Rick brings his gun up to press it to xer head.

“Honestly, every fucking couple thinks they’re Bonnie and Clyde these days.”

“It’s not the same,” Caliverthe mutters, not even looking at Rick or the gun, running tentacles gently over xer bondmate’s unconscious form. “It’s not really murder.”

Shining eyes turn back to look at him finally.

“You’re only half a person. I see that now.”

“Well then I’ll consider this a single count of manslaughter,” Rick retorts. He shoots them both in the head with two clean shots in quick succession, just as the manager and security burst into the room.

“We saw everything on the monitors, sir. Are you all right?”

Covered in sweat, blood, Xytolian effluvia, and decidedly unhappy, he turns to meet them. The manager looks ready to faint, eyes flitting nervously around the chaos of the room.

Sighing, Rick decides against giving into the easy threat again and holsters his pistol, cutting to the chase.

“Three of the most expensive bottles you have behind the bar out front and a promise to screen your goddamn employees before each shift.”

The manager almost falls over himself nodding in agreement to the extraordinarily generous offer. If word of this got out more than half his clientele would vanish overnight.

Security is already dragging the pair out the door. They won’t be anywhere near the first pair to find their soulmates and wind up dead in a ditch a day or two later. Murder/Suicides, double suicides, and risk-taking behavior were common in the newly bonded, especially those who met later in life. Apparently meeting your ‘other half’ after years without them made you feel invincible. The ultimate natural high ending a perpetual midlife crisis.

God, soulmates made you stupid.

“We’ll have your complimentary drinks ready at the bar, sir,” the manager bows, following them out and quickly closing the door.

Snorting, Rick grabs a towel from the stack beside the bed and activates the rain-simulating shower in the corner of the room.

Shaking the chunks of goo from his hair he scrubs at the grey film that covers his front. Thankfully his coat is self-cleaning, but his shirt is soaked. Gross.

Pressing a button on the wall, the rain from the ceiling suddenly turns more viscous and slippery. Whoops. Pressing the one beside it, it thins again and gains a pleasant, light scent that foams when friction is applied.

Rick scrubs down from head to toe, feeling moderately less murderous as the remains of his third favorite sex worker disappear down the drain. Turning off the water, he towels off his hair and starts to wrap it around his waist before noticing a patch of grey he’d missed on his forearm.

He rubs absently at it with the towel, but it doesn’t peel away.

Looking closer, he sees it isn’t a residue at all, but a part of his skin, starting to change, thirty years after the last time he’d wanted it to.

“Fuck.”


	2. Roche Lobe

**Roche Lobe:** The region around a star in a binary system within which matter is gravitationally bound to that star.

 

* * *

 

Morty’s lungs burn in the summer air as his feet pound against the sidewalks in counterpoint with the music pulsing through his headphones. Sweat trickles down his neck and sticks his t-shirt to his back, puddling in his running shoes socks. His mouth feels cracked and dry, and his breath is starting to rasp, a harsh crackling noise that echoes the screaming of his chest and legs.

He doesn’t know how much longer he can go on, endorphins and adrenaline giving up the ghost after nearly two hours of running flat out. The music in his ears is interrupted again by the insistent sound of the ‘battery low’ alert. It doesn’t really hurt the song, Morty hates electronic music, it’s just the best beat to keep running to.

Everything hurts.

His feet, his legs, his chest, his arms, his lungs, his mouth. Parts of him that have no business hurting have jumped in on the game too, taking overflow from other areas of his body like city hospitals after a bus crash.

It’s perfect. He doesn’t want to stop.

When he was younger Jerry had tried to throw Morty into every organized sport there was, convinced that if Morty was terrible at basketball and football and soccer and tennis, it simply meant he had undiscovered talents lurking somewhere else for synchronized swimming, or baseball.

Beth had finally put a stop to that when the latest attempt, lacrosse, had given him three concussions in two months.

Eventually though, they’d tried track. And that had been a disaster too, though in a different way. It turns out that Morty isn’t entirely without athletic ability, despite all evidence to the contrary. He’s just terrible at people. And teams. And paying attention to where things like balls or oncoming opponents are.

But running was perfect. If he ran long enough, and hard enough, he’d end up in that gloriously empty, grounded place that was so much rarer these days. He didn’t see anything except for the road in front of him. Didn’t hear anything except for the sound of his own breathing and whatever crappy music he’d put on when he’d started. Didn’t have to think or answer questions or worry about the ways in which it was becoming increasingly obvious that he was a freak.

But his legs are starting to go rubbery, and if he wipes out and eats pavement again it’s not likely anyone will come and pick him up, so Morty regretfully turns towards home and slows his pace.

Stumbling through the patio door a few minutes later, Morty toes off his wet shoes, and leaves them outside. It’s late on Sunday morning, Dad is still out for day two of the hobbyist convention, and Summer had spent the night at Tammy’s. He doesn’t see Mom though. She hadn’t been up yet when he’d left, it’s very possible she’s still in bed.

Turning on the kitchen sink, Morty gulps at the stream of cold water before burying his head under it entirely, groaning in relief. Grabbing a package of pop-tarts from the breadbox, he heads back upstairs, stuffing the blessed sugar in his mouth as quickly as possible as he goes.

The soaked t-shirt and shorts end up in a growing pile on his bedroom floor, joined quickly by his socks and underwear. Sighing in relief, Morty shuffles through the pile of papers on his desk, looking for the sketchbook he’d been working with last night.

He’d tucked it safely under a mass of his older drawings, and the pile of G.E.D. workbooks that Beth had dropped on his lap a few weeks earlier along with the declaration that he wasn’t going  back to school next semester. Morty had flipped through one of them and understood less ten percent of the first chapter.

Still, classes didn’t start for another month, he has plenty of time to lose that series of battles. The only way Morty seems to retain things these days is from the science documentaries he plays on repeat after the nightmares. He wraps himself in blankets and let the images of supernovas and atoms blend with the calm and wondering voices of the narrators, assuring the teen of his tiny place in an infinitely majestic cosmos until he manages to fall asleep again.

Pulling his prize loose triumphantly, he sprawls out on his mattress, chucking his headphones at his nightstand as he fishes impatiently for a charcoal pencil in the crack between his bed and the wall.

The book is full of half-finished drawings and lined sketches, some copied fastidiously from references, and others from life. The first pages were covered with studies of Summer’s hands, clasped around her cell phone in various ways. The pictures eventually morph into his parents’ hands, with Dad’s holding a pair of tweezers as he works on a model, and Mom’s elegantly pressing against the stem of a wine glass.

By the middle of the book he’d improved enough to start working on faces again, and eventually full body portraits from the front and side. He still has a long way to go, but Morty’s proud that he can pick out definite features of his family from the images he’s put to paper.

The last few pages of the book all follow a different theme, though.

Morty had jerked awake from a dream last week, panting and soaked in sweat, reaching for a sketchpad before he’d even flipped the switch for the lamp beside him. This isn’t unusual, he’s always gotten his best ideas from the dreams, and he’s gained a moderate following on Instagram for his drawings, still focused on bizarre monsters and alien landscapes.

But that night he doesn’t draw tentacles, or stars, or breasts or explosions. He starts to draw a man.

However that’s as far as he manages to get, the outline of something tall and masculine, a negative space in the center of the page he can’t fill in. His dream fades faster and faster as the dawn starts to fade in through his windows.

It’s a start though.

The next night he dreams again, and he wakes up and draws for hours, agonizing over the shape of an ear or the set of a mouth he can’t quite get. And the next night the same. And the next. He starts to keep the sketchbook under his pillow when he falls asleep, both wanting it close at hand and paranoid that Mom and Dad will find it in one of their irregular raids of his room.

Staring down at the half-completed image before him, Morty bites his lip and frowns. He can never get the eyes. They’re either too young or too old. Too kind or too cruel. It feels like if he can get the eyes, the rest of the picture will fall into place.

He’s certain of parts of it, at least. The hands. The adam’s apple. The shape of his thighs. The holster he’s drawn that falls over them. The mark on his left forearm.

Shifting a little, Morty groans as he rubs against the bedspread. Fixating on this is frustrating in more than one way.

Closing the notebook carefully and tucking it under the bed, he rolls his hips a little and lets the aches from his earlier exercise flow through his body.

He’s been jerking off for as long as he can remember, but the last few months have been something else entirely. He’d hit eight times in a day last month, and it had barely done anything for the near-constant desire that thrums under his skin. Even when he’s completely fucked out, sometimes he can feel electricity shooting down his spine and pooling in his gut, valiantly trying to raise his chafed and protesting dick.

Pulling on the cleanest pair of shorts currently gracing his bedroom floor, Morty pads down the hallway to the shower, cranking it up as hot as it will go and inhaling deeply as steam fills the room.

The water burns, but it releases the worst of the tension in his aching muscles, and loosening the dried sweat from his skin. Grabbing a pumpful of 5-in-1, Morty starts to scrub it into his hair and armpits, lamenting the loss of the quiet he’d worked so hard to gain as the white noise that permeates his existence starts to crawl back in.

At least it’s nice today. A heavy, lazy feeling in his limbs that suits the exertion they’ve undergone well, and if he closes his eyes, Morty can almost feel ghostly lips around his cock.

Still no sounds of Mom in the hallway. Fuck it.

Giving in, he reaches for Summer’s fancy conditioner, and leans his head against the tile of the shower wall. Wrapping his own hand around himself for the third time that morning, he lets the heat of the steam surrounding him melt away the vertigo of the conflicting phantom sensations.

 

* * *

 

Earth is even crappier than he remembers it.

Nostalgia has never been much of a character trait, but even so the ‘pale blue dot’ is looking a little less blue and a little more sickly than the last time he saw it. The ice caps are receding like the hairline of a middle-aged accountant, and the greens are more nauseated than lush and verdant.

Sure, Earth’s always been kind of middle of the road, planet-wise, but Rick but can’t help but eye it from orbit like a rundown ex-girlfriend, enthusiastically flagging him down from across the gym of a high school reunion.

_Oh hey, it’s you! Gosh, what a surprise! Well we always knew you’d settle down and wind up back here..._

Something bitter and distasteful that feels a lot like inevitability wells in the back of Rick’s mouth and he takes a deep swig from his latest bottle to flush it out.

He’s done literally everything on his to-do list. Shit he’s put off for decades has suddenly been accomplished in a brief binge of adventure and hedonism the last couple of years.

Two years, three months, and seventeen days, to be exact. Earth-standard. He’s counted.

But his hedonistic, adventure-strewn twenty-seven month bachelor party has petered out now. He’s spent the last six weeks on the best pleasure planet in the central finite curve. It took him obscene amounts of money and every connection he had to get a spot, and he’d barely enjoyed a minute.

Well maybe a few minutes. Or hours. But the majority of the time the back of his head was screaming, the way it had started two years ago and getting louder every day.

The whole whirlwind tour has felt like preparing for death, honestly. And if Rick goes by every other example he’s seen, he’s not wrong.

He’s woken up every day in a pile of bodies, either dead or alive, and found that quiet moment that only comes with mornings. When the day looms ahead, full of possibilities or nothingness, uncertain but not uncertain enough, ticking away the time but refusing to do anything about it until a decision is made, an action taken to engage.

Despite his best efforts Rick has sat through over six hundred of those mornings, trying each time to find the fortitude to pull the trigger.

Each time he hadn’t just reinforced that bitter taste on the back of his tongue.

Inevitability.

He ignores the part of his mind he’s been trying to kill with alcohol that reminds him what he’s doing isn’t true inevitability, only a symptom of the weakening fibers of his moral cloth, his barely-existent self-restraint.

He knows he’s a hypocrite. Why not lie to himself as well.

Draining the last of the bottle, Rick chucks it in the back with the rest of the empties, grimacing a little as he catches a whiff of his armpit as he does.

Three days in a ship living on a diet of brown booze and self-loathing has him reeking of something unpleasant that's died and then been pickled in memoriam. The recirculated air has done its best to shield him from the appalling stench, but now that he’s picked it up it’s impossible to ignore.

Rick’s tempted to set down, to find a hotel room, scrub off the sweat and the grime, grab a few hours of sleep, even give himself one more morning to try and break the odds on pulling that trigger, but he pushes through it.

He’s already cracked. He’s here. Pretending he hasn’t and delaying things further for the sake of a shower and a nap isn’t going to change things.

And besides, freshly showered, shaved, and sober is basically his equivalent of showing up with flowers. Best not to set any unrealistic expectations.

Stabbing at the ship’s navigation system, Rick sets the coordinates for just outside Seattle. He hasn’t seen his daughter in eighteen years, but why not double-decker the shit sandwich that is his homecoming.

The ship skids across the front lawn of a suburban ranch-house before coming to a halt. Checking one last time for any bottles he may have missed, Rick throws the door open and immediately falls out after it, face-planting into a the pile of soil and St. Augustine he’s uprooted. Not immune to the irony of kissing the ground, he snorts and pulls himself up, muttering under his breath as he tries to get his land-legs back.

Brushing the dirt and bits of grass off, he walks unsteadily towards the front door of the house across the street. He refuses to allow himself the miserable cliche of not ringing the doorbell immediately, jabbing at it almost angrily and waiting for the door to swing open.

Why hadn’t he rationed a bottle for this moment? He’s far too fucking sober, even if he’d promised himself he wouldn’t let his miserable slide into defeat be because of a blackout. The door stubbornly doesn’t open immediately, and Rick looks around impatiently.

There’s a doormat with a picture of a horse on it. Two cars in the driveway, even though there’s a garage. Unlike all the other houses on the street tall hedges block the neighbors on either side. Very tall hedges, actually. And well kept, past the second story of the houses.

Rick hasn’t been on a street like this since Diane died.

He’d gone to the funeral. Well, sort of.

He’d gone to the funeral home, could hear the anguished sounds of her new husband, her bondmate, crying like it was going out of style.

Rick had ended up drinking in the parking lot instead, imagining bursting in to cause a scene. The unbonded, deserting ex-husband of the bonded deceased. But ultimately he doesn’t. He owed Diane that much, at least.

He hadn’t even bothered to look up his legal rights to Beth. Diane would have wanted her to stay put. He’d seen him too, her soulmate, clinging to Beth as they’d walked in the front door.

That’s how he knows that Beth looks like her mother now. But from the glimpse he’d caught her face had been bone-dry like his.

He should probably look surprised about that when she answers the door.

Giving in to the most acceptable of the childish urges itching under his skin, Rick jams his finger against the doorbell a few more times, hearing it echo through the hall inside.

Muffled footsteps and annoyed cursing move inside, and he steels himself at the same time he smiles a little fondly.

She hasn’t changed that much then.

The door swings open.

“Can I help y-”

Rick knows the second the door cracks open that it isn’t his daughter behind the threshold. It doesn’t give him any kind of edge on reacting though, he watches almost outside his own body as the thin figure of a teenage boy with mousy brown hair swings it open.

His eyes swing automatically to the kid’s face, but the second the barrier of the door dissipates the screaming little voice in the back of his head starts to _sing_ instead, the dissonance of the last two years vanishing in a second. Rick’s eyes meet green ones just in time to watch the boy’s pupils dilate in real time, and he imagines his own must be doing the same, somewhere beyond the catastrophic panic in his chest.

The word on the boy’s lips has frozen with shock as well, but it thaws and slips out with a new layer of awe and wonder that makes Rick’s skin crawl at the same time it makes that voice in his head turn from a song into a fucking choir.

“ _You.”_

Two years. Rick’s managed to stay away for more than two years since the mark came in. Unless they’ve started putting something in the milk around here, that means his _mate_ should be eighteen. Sixteen on the far end of average. The kid in front of him looks barely fifteen.

Or does he? He hasn’t actually spent time around children in years. Human teenagers in even longer. Hell, Rick hasn’t spent time with many humans in years. It’s entirely possible he’s lost what little knack he had for socializing with them by now.

He suddenly realizes he has no idea how long he’s been standing there, staring like a moron. Fortunately the kid, (his soulmate, that voice in his head smugly supplies), doesn’t seem to have noticed, no doubt immersed in his own mass of hormones and existential crises.

Then again, whatever kind of journey the teen has going on, it doesn’t seem to be hitting the stops that Rick expected it would.

He doesn’t look shocked at Rick’s age, or the fact that his soulmate currently looks and smells like Beetlejuice. In fact, he still looks downright starry-eyed.

Must be a good hit for the kid. Rick’s battered serotonin receptors have already lost half of the buzz he got when he opened the door.

Opening his mouth to say something, he clears his throat and tries to figure out what to say. For all the drama of the last two years, of getting to Earth in one piece and finishing this miserable scavenger hunt, Rick hasn’t thought of a damn thing to say to the person he’s chained to for the rest of his life.

‘Sorry’ seems inadequate.

‘Looks like we both got the wrong end of the shit stick’ doesn’t have the right ring to it.

Closing his mouth, he settles for a strained smile that looks more like a shrug crawled onto his face and died there. Fortunately his new counterpart doesn’t seem to have anything prepared either.

Suddenly, the kid moves, stepping across the threshold. Rick jumps back faster than he has at half the weapons pulled on him, nearly tripping over the horse-themed welcome mat. The kid reaches out his arm as if to steady him, but pauses when Rick pulls back.

“S-sorry. I just thought…”

Yeah, it definitely sounds inadequate.

The teen is only wearing a yellow t-shirt, and on his extended arm Rick can clearly see his own name scrawled across a scrawny forearm. The mark on his own arm burns beneath the layers of his filthy clothes, and he opens his mouth to give voice to it, to reclaim some of the high ground he’s clearly just lost jumping like a frightened rabbit, but someone beats him to it.

“Morty? Who is it?”

A figure appears in the hallway, and Rick rips his eyes away to meet it.

“Hi, Sweetie.”

The boy startles at the pet name, tearing his own gaze away from Rick to look back at his mother.

“Dad.”

Beth looks less like Diane than she had fifteen years ago. Rick can still pick out pieces, the same coloring, the same nose. But there’s more of the twelve year old Beth than the the twenty year old he’d seen.

The glass of wine in her hand makes her look more like a Bond villain than drinking Cabernet at eleven A.M. should, and once more he recognizes her expression from his own in the mirror.

Shock, yes. But beneath that a calculating, self-assured expression. It’s almost smug.

Morty steps back into the hall, trying to find an angle where he can look at them both without whipping his head back and forth like a bird.

Rick sighs. The singing in his head is giving him the beginnings of a throbbing headache.

“Do you have a shower I could use?”

 

* * *

 

Thankfully time progresses, for the most part, in a linear and ordered fashion in these parts of the universe. If it hadn’t, Rick is certain that this this waking nightmare of a day would never have ended.

After a shower he’d dragged out as long as possible, Rick had come downstairs again to meet the rest of the family. His son-in-law is about as unimpressive as might be possible, and his granddaughter is too soaked in teenage angst and melodrama about the newest family developments for him to get much of a read on her. She vanishes to a friend’s house after an hour, declaring it ‘too weird’ to deal with on a Tuesday night.

Hushed conversations had snapped silent the moment he’d entered the living room, and he’d had less than the usual level of tolerance for stupid questions, but eventually by the miracle of entropy, dinner had arrived and been consumed.

Eventually as the table was cleared and sounds of hushed arguing emanated from the kitchen, Rick realized he was alone with Morty again.

For all the polite and then curious and then utterly inane questions the family had asked about Rick’s life, surprisingly few had come from his- grandson. In fact he’d been quiet since Rick had emerged from the shower, but he had no idea if that was a normal trait or not. Fair enough, Rick hasn’t been orating at his best this evening either.

The boy opens his mouth to say something, and Rick tries to think of something to cut him off, when the voices from the kitchen suddenly cease and Jerry appears in the doorway.

“Hey, buddy! We’re gonna go to the movies. Give your Mom some time to get reacquainted with her Dad.”

Morty frowns. “I don’t want to go to th-”

“We’ll meet up with Summer there, it’ll be great, come on.”

The teen starts to protest, looking across the table at his grandfather for reinforcements, but Rick ducks his gaze to focus on the TV instead. It isn't turned on.

Beth has also appeared in the doorway, looking less chipper than her husband.

“We need some time, Morty. Go with your father.”

Rick expects more of a fight, more teenage rebellion or at least complaints, but the kid just shoots a last glance at him across the table before slinking off quietly towards the front door with his dad.

The front door clicks shut and Beth disappears into the kitchen again, reappearing with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. She pours generously as the sound of the car disappears up the street.

He accepts the glass gratefully and drains it in one go, already reaching for the bottle for another. Beth is right behind him, and he pours his little girl another two fingers to match his.

They sit in silence and drink for a good quarter of an hour, until the bottle down to the dregs. It’s companionable almost, and Rick can’t tell if it’s meant to be an olive branch or just something to help her steel her nerves before she lays into him.

Getting up, she heads back to the kitchen, barely stumbling at all over the threshold. Rick feels something resembling pride twinge in his chest. Beth returns with another bottle clutched in one hand, and a manila file folder in the other. She drops the folder on the table with a heavy thump. It’s got to be nearly three inches thick, and the corners are worn with age. Eyeing it like she’s just dropped a live rattlesnake on the middle of the rug, she slumps down in her chair, taking a swig directly from the bottle.

When he isn’t offered a pull, Rick drags the file over and flips the cover up to the first page.

 

_Universal Child Health Record Summary_

_Seattle Children’s Hospital_

_Page 1 of 23_

 

“Morty’s medical records?”

Beth nods. “Eleven years of child shrinks, diagnosticians, and specialists, all to tell us they can’t do jack shit.”

She doesn’t offer any further information, and Rick starts to read, skimming the summary at first, then gradually sinking into the longer details.

 

 **_Name:_ ** _Mortimer Smith_

 **_Age:_ ** _14_

 **_Blood Type:_ ** _B+_

 **_Allergies:_ ** _None_

 **_Diagnosis:_ ** _Severe Chronic Early-Onset Bond Syndrome, complications due to insufficient genetic diversity_

 

The list of symptoms covers three pages, documenting nightmares beginning at age four that turned into diagnostically quantifiable night terrors by age seven. Hypersexuality, recurring symptoms of intoxication and withdrawal from vomiting to photosensitivity.

Apparently when he was eleven he’d gone from tachycardia into cardiac arrest and been dead for three minutes, foaming at the mouth and unresponsive to external stimuli for a few hours. Rick does a little mental math to convert the date: Squanchy’s 100th birthday party. He’d barely survived that weekend too.

Morty’s almost spent more days in a hospital than a classroom, ‘undiagnosed focus issues’ led to him dropping out of six schools and being held back three times. Though it looks like it wasn’t for nothing. Apparently he’s been the subject of over a dozen published peer-reviewed articles, stuck in the back of the folder. The first case of incest-related EBS to be recognized in over a hundred years. Well, in the First-World at least. What a landmark.

There are drawings towards the back of the folder with the psychological write-ups. They range from sloppy crayon drawings to much more refined colored pencil and ink sketches. There’s more than a few species and planets that are easily recognizable, but even more that Rick doesn’t remember at all. The ones he does though, are all exactly the same as he remembers them, and it dawns on him that they’ve been drawn from his point of view.

Through his own eyes, but with someone else’s lens on the experiences. No Gromflamite looks that sinister, the capital city of Aurealis III is far more grey and bland in person, and at no point, Rick is certain, had the tits on that electrician from Merciato been that big. He holds up the drawing to the light anyway, staring at the depiction of his own hands braced beside her shoulders. He’s completely forgotten her name, but he does remember the way her hair curled on the sheets below him, exactly like that.

The psych evaluation the picture is stapled to comes with it, and he catches a phrase from the closing notes:

_...extremely susceptible and open to influence by his bondmate, whether intentional..._

Rick folds the drawing away and reads the entire summation.  

> _Morty remains exceptionally receptive to outside pressure and influence, with an underdeveloped sense of self and self-worth. He has become defined by his relationship with his future bondmate and unable to develop as an individual, despite encouragement from teachers and family members. If the bond is not finalized before his brain finishes development he will likely remain in a state of arrested development and have difficulty adjusting into society as an individual._
> 
> _However, it is important to note that if the bond is formed sooner, Morty will remain extremely susceptible and open to influence by his bondmate, whether intentional or not, through the shared state-sharing. This could further damage his development as an individual, or allow his bondmate to exert intentional influence to mold his personality._
> 
> _Recommend extensive individual and couples’ counseling sessions if his bondmate is located to minimize damage. However, due to obvious ongoing substance abuse issues, it is likely Morty’s bondmate will resist counseling. Proceed with caution._
> 
> __Dr Susan Newman, Ph.D, M.D._ _

Having seen enough, Rick stuffs the papers he’s strewn across the table back in the folder and tosses it back in his daughter’s direction. She’s made her way steadily through a quarter of the new bottle of whiskey, forsaking the pretense of a glass.

“Didn’t I teach you to share?”

“No, you didn’t,” Beth responds, but she still loosens her grip on the bottle and holds it out. Rick takes a deep chug and slides it back, staring at the wall. Beth stares blankly at a wine stain on the carpet.

Now comes the yelling, according to the script. The shouting at Rick for something completely beyond his fucking control, that he didn’t even want. The venting of years of rage and frustration, from the moment he’d walked out the door two decades ago to the moment that a bevy of Doctors had signed and rubber-stamped letters that said that thanks to her father, her son would never be normal. He’s not ready for it, exactly, but he’s resigned. And the fact that she’s still being civil enough to offer him a drink to get through it is proof that at least he and Diane didn’t completely screw the pooch on raising her right.

“I only have one question,” Beth says quietly, and Rick winces in anticipation. Long, explosive rants he can handle. Single-point arguments mean she’s been planning this, probably for years.

The seconds stretch on without interruption though, and for a moment Rick wonders if she’s passed out sitting up in her seat. He reaches for the bottle again, and she finally speaks.

“Are you disappointed in me?”

There are a thousand questions Rick has prepared himself for, but that one comes straight out of left field. Dumbfounded, he freezes, staring at her with his arm still halfway across the table. To his horror, he sees his daughter’s eyes are full of tears, threatening to fall on the table, even as her jaw and fists are clenched.

There is no amount of liquor in this house that can make this moment bearable.

His immediate instinct is to deny it, to finish reaching out and grab her hand, to dig up old, forgotten words of comfort and soothing, but the time for that passed years ago when Diane did.

Instead Rick sits back, and tries to figure out what exactly, the fuck she means. Because she’d had Morty and screwed up his life instead of doing something with the potential she’d had? Because she’d married what seems like the biggest loser he’s ever met? Because she couldn’t fix the clusterfuck that has landed in her lap before he showed up on her doorstep again?

Eventually he gives up and sighs.

“Why would I be disappointed in you, Beth?”

Instead of answering, Beth pulls her right hand out of her lap and places it on the table, rotating her arm to show off her soulmark. A soulmark that most definitely does not start with the letter ‘J’.

“It came in about two years after you left,” Beth says quietly. “I was already dating Jerry then.”

Makes sense. She would have been about sixteen. Most people didn’t take dating before college seriously at all, but there was always that initial bursting of the romantic bubble that came with seeing your first girlfriend’s arm get marked with someone else’s name while you were still riding the high of getting to second base.

“That next year mom got remarried, and I got pregnant with Morty, and I just…”

The tears have started to fall now, and Beth tugs her sleeve down, using it to wipe angrily at her face.

“Are you disappointed I didn’t wait? That I did the same thing you and mom did?”

Rick can suddenly see it all. Diane, wasting away from the goddamn chemo, too proud to pick up the phone and call him for help. Or maybe just smart enough to know that he’d be too proud to answer if she did. Her new husband, loyally changing her IVs and bringing her meds, staring back at her with that dopey new-bond look as he held her paper-thin hand.

And his little girl, full of rage at one parent who’d left and another who was leaving, making rash decisions, and clinging to starry-eyed, loyal Jerry, who already knew she was too good for him when the mark on his own arm confirmed it. Knocking her up was probably the luckiest moment of his life. Convincing her to keep it, to marry him… that was the clincher.

“No, Sweetie,” Rick says, “You made your own decisions.”

The likelihood that those decisions weren’t at least in part motivated by the questions an inquisitive child asked about the blank patch on her father’s arm and the answers she received is close to zero.

“It’s okay though,” Beth sniffs and smiles tightly, reaching out to take his hand. “I get it.”

“Yeah well, we all become our parents,” Rick says off-handedly, choosing not to examine the statement lest he find too many accuracies within it.

“No, but it makes sense,” she says fervently. “You married Mom, and I was born. And I married Jerry, and Morty was born.”

Beth drops his hand and pull the file across the table towards her. She flips it open in a frenzy and pulls a form from the very back of the folder, practically flinging it towards him. Rick sees the title.

 

**Parental Release of Minor into Adult Soulmate’s Care**

 

“It’s going to be okay,” Beth repeats. “I trust you.”

She takes his hand again and squeezes it, smiling more brightly.

“He brought you back so we could be a family.”

Rick reads through the form. His name has already been printed alongside Morty’s on the signature line.

 

**Beth Smith - Parent/Guardian          Rick Sanchez - Adult Soulmate          Mortimer Smith - Minor**

 

Beth’s signature has already been scrawled across her name. The printed date beside it is from almost two years ago.

 

* * *

 

_Green eyes stare up at Rick from a too-young face, set too deeply in their skull and ringed with dark circles that will never entirely fade. They’ve grown darker every night the boy has sat up from nightmares, waiting for the sun to rise, every day he’s suffered hangovers and horrors that are not his except by a miserable chance of birthright._

_The weight of those worries should make him look older. The marks of stress and exhaustion sit on his face like heavy, ill-suited ornaments. He looks so tired. Rick wants to make them go away. To vanish with a touch of his hand, a word of comfort that won’t force its way over his tongue and past his lips, because he knows it’s a lie._

_He knows what put every one of those ghosts behind the teenager’s eyes, recognizes some of them from his own rare looks in the mirror late at night. Rick can almost see each one replaying across the boy’s sclera like a movie projector. He watches his life play out, decades of things he’d forgotten or done his best to forget crawling through the boy’s eyes with the filters of booze and time and his own cynicism entirely absent._

_But worse than the massacres, the hard-fought losses, the tragedies, are the hundreds of moments Rick sees nothing but himself._

_The isolation. The bitterness, building from his own youth and eventually permeating every corner of his being. The seething resentment. Towards everything, everyone, his whole universe and all the others, but most of all towards himself, and the boy on his knees in front of him._

_‘I never wanted this’ the memories scream. And the green eyes sparkle back. ‘I know.’_

_Rick swears he can see the circles under the boy’s eyes grow darker, heavier with every moment, weighing the boy down, and he curses, refusing to feel guilt for his own thoughts, his opinions, his life-long fundamental beliefs, even as he sees them start to eat away at the boy before his eyes._

_Those are_ **_his_ ** _fucking thoughts. His, and his alone. He should be entitled to those. They were never meant for anyone else’s consumption, never meant to be shared or stolen or censured by some snot-nosed brat that can watch and cast judgement on the entirety of his life, and come away looking so goddamn_ **_resigned_** _._

_The urge to take returns again, stronger and fueled by a roiling anger in Rick’s stomach. It’s not his goddamn fault. Even if the things living behind the boy’s eyes are of his own creation, he was not the one who unleashed them there._

_Rick reaches out to touch the teen’s face, uncertain even as he moves if he intends to strike him or just try to make him blink, to close those eyes, to look away, even for a second…_

_But it doesn’t matter. The second his finger brushes against the boy’s cheek the visions clear, scattered into dust that floats away from the smaller figure to cling to Rick again, returning to their rightful owner. A guileless smile breaks out across his face and his eyes fall closed as he buries his face in the palm of Rick’s hand like an affectionate house cat, breathing heavily but calmly._

_For a moment the world is peaceful, and something like triumph settles in Rick’s chest._

_Then the lids to Morty’s eyes slide open, and Rick almost jumps. His eyes are nearly black, his pupils blown to almost three times their regular size in the way that only happens with truly spectacular chemical highs. The older man recognizes the heavy breathing as arousal now, and the rub of Morty’s cheek against his hand is no longer just that of a docile pet, but of a cat in heat. His spine arches and Rick can feel heat pouring off of his skin as the boy moans, low and hollow._

_All the ghosts are gone, but it feels less like an exorcism has occurred than like rats fleeing a sinking ship. A thin ring of green still remains around Morty’s eyes, but by some trick of the light it almost looks like it’s eroding, falling piece by piece into the empty chasm where it used to reside. The dark circles beneath his eyes are still there too, making his face look sunken and gaunt, even as a bright flush from arousal rises to his cheeks. His lips part from that broad smile, spit-slick and full as he continues to emit breathy sounds of pleasure._

_He looks like a twisted ventriloquist puppet, just waiting for a lap to perch on and a hand to guide him._

_“Rick-”_

_It speaks his name, desperate and reverent, and Rick jerks his hand away, stepping back despite himself._

_The thing leans after him, collapsing onto its palms and crawling slowly towards him, licking its lips and staring up at him with adoration shining from every pore. That shouldn’t be possible with those empty caverns where its eyes should be._

_“Please,” the thing with Morty’s face moans breathily, “I want you.”_

_Rick finds his legs don’t move anymore as the thing wraps a hand around his ankle and practically humps the ground, pleas streaming incessantly._

_“Let me suck you off, I’ll be such a good little whore, please Rick, just tell me I’m your good boy…”_

_He hadn’t thought there was more room for disgust and horror left in the pit of his stomach, but he apparently finds more at the realization that the thing’s need is starting to creep down his own spine, to infect him with lust and an echo of a miserable, aching emptiness._

_It’s still talking when he hauls it to its feet by the arm and silences it. It’s not really a kiss, it’s an assault that ranks among the most vicious he’s ever planned, but it succeeds. The thing shuts up, moaning and gasping enthusiastically, but more importantly it breaks eye contact, rolling those beetle-black eyes up into its head as they slip closed in ecstasy._

_All too soon though, the kiss is over and the thing begins its wretched begging again._

_“Fuck me, please, anyway you want, it’s all yours, I’m yours…”_

_Rick gains a few moments of hard-earned silence when he licks his way up the thing’s neck, a handful more when he sinks his teeth into the boy’s shoulder, drawing a wail that makes his skin crawl and his cock harder than he’s felt in years. But no matter what he does the thing always starts to speak after a moment._

_“I’ve wanted you for so long, use me, wreck me, fuck m-”_

_“Shut the fuck up,” Rick growls, shaking the thing roughly before backhanding it across the face. A thin cut where a jagged nail caught the skin welts white, then red. Another glorious, vital moment of silence._

_And then the thing moans again. Deeper and louder than before, like Rick has just found his goddamn g-spot on the first try. The body in his arms straightens and grinds against him, grinning with too many teeth. Twin black holes echo from the face that had belonged to his grandson, all-consuming and unsatisfied._

_When the thing speaks again its tone has changed, from pleading to hunger, cut through with delight._

_“_ **_More_** _.”_

_And so Rick gives it more._

 

* * *

 

Consciousness comes in an instant, the way it always does, but awareness takes another moment to catch up. Rick’s surroundings are unfamiliar, but not as unfamiliar as would make him comfortable.

He’s in a small, claustrophobic room with no windows, that’s larger than a closet but too small to be a bedroom anywhere but Eastern Asia or New York City. Sloppily labeled boxes in English are piled everywhere but the door, and there’s a kink in that exact spot on his back that he hasn’t felt in decades, the one he always used to get when he slept-

Rick’s hand slides an inch to the left and comes into contact with dented aluminum. His old army cot. Memories of a hundred other nights spent on the crappy canvas vie for space in his head, but they’re quickly shunted off to the side in place of newer, more cutting-edge horrors.

He can still see spiraling black in the darkest corners of the room, can still hear incessant demands echoing in the suburban silence. And yet his dick is still hard enough to cut titanium.

Refusing to do jack shit about it, Rick folds his hands under his head, letting himself be annoyed by the metal joint that still digs into his elbow when he does, and waits it out. But even as the dream obligingly starts to slip away, his erection doesn’t, throbbing like he’s spent three months getting cockblocked at a Roman orgy, not three days cramped in a ship doing his best to overwhelm the nanites in his liver.

Idly he starts sifting through his spank bank, trying to find something to at least make his dick feel less fucking disconnected from his brain, when he hears it. The slight shifting of the floor in the hallway, giving up a tiny creak. And there, just behind it, a quiet inhalation of breath, of someone else too attuned to the noises of the house.

“Either grow the balls to come in or go back to bed, kid,” Rick says, not bothering to raise his voice or stop trying to recreate the face of the Argosian he’d picked up a few months earlier.

Silence falls for another second, and just as he’s wondering if he’s missed the sound of light footsteps up the hall, the knob to the door turns.

Rick had avoided looking at him too much during dinner, a favor which had very much not been returned. The teen had bored those fucking eyes into him like he was trying to figure out Rick’s blood type from across the table. No wonder he was having nightmares about it.

He can feel the same heavy gaze raking across him now, and he tries not to take the kid’s heavy breathing as a compliment. Sighing, he sits up and swings his legs over the side of the cot, rubbing the back of his hair to free it from the static and eyeing the small figure in the shadows.

“You just here to stare at me more? Or did you want something.”

The ‘something’ is pretty damn obvious. The ki- _Morty_ is just about tearing a hole in his boxer shorts, and his hands keep fiddling with the hem of his t-shirt just above it like he’s seconds from palming himself through them. The second Rick had sat up his eyes had immediately moved to the older man’s crotch, and apparently gotten stuck there.

“I-I want-”

Morty finds his voice, though he’s still rudely, if amusingly, staring at Rick’s cock instead of the floor or his face, but he seems to peter out after a moment, before taking a deep breath and fixing Rick squarely in the face.

It’s less of a shock than the first time on the doorstep, and Rick isn’t sure if that’s repeat exposure or the low light dulling the full effect, but the goddamn singing in the back of his head starts up again, quieter but insistent, setting up a chant that churns in his pulse and sends a counterpoint down to his still-traitorous hard-on.

“I’ve waited,” the boy breathes, and he seems to be inching closer somehow though he hasn’t moved. Rick realizes he’s leaning in to meet him, realizes the thought of pulling back makes his head hurt, breaks the harmonies.

“My whole life, I’ve been waiting for you.”

The declaration falls heavy on the dusty boxes of Christmas decorations and tax returns.

Morty licks his lips unconsciously as he reaches a trembling hand out towards Rick’s, eyes shining fever bright, and Rick is hit with a sickening wave of deja vu.

He pulls his hand away, and rises to his feet quickly enough to make Morty step back reflexively.

The air is charged, and the singing seems to have paused for a moment as Morty looks at him, waiting for him to seal their joint fate. Waiting for Rick to have the words to explain away every piece of teen angst, to be the cure for a medical file, three inches thick.

He doesn’t know where to start. How to explain a lifetime, a full and rich lifetime, of living without this _thing_ . Of being alone, in all the ways that Morty would imagine, and even more he wouldn’t, couldn’t. Of two years of having his life, painstakingly constructed, carefully maintained, ripped apart. _His_ life.

“Well I wasn’t waiting for you.”

There’s no visible change in expression on Morty’s face, but after a moment he turns and leaves. Rick locks the door behind him.


	3. Symbiotic Stars

**Symbiotic Stars:** A form of binary star, composed of a star of higher mass such as a White Dwarf, and a star of low mass, such as a gaseous Red Giant. The White Dwarf forms first, gaining a gravitational advantage, and often prevents the red giant from achieving equal status by siphoning mass.

 

* * *

 

Over the next few days Rick adjusts to being back on Earth, life in the Smith house, and having apparently acquired a new shadow at the age of seventy. No matter where he goes, Morty follows him.

Not at his heels, with the enthusiasm and energy of a loyal dog the way he had the first day he’d arrived, but with the caution and wariness of a kicked stray, circling only for the promise of scraps.

Rick would arrive in the living room, put his feet up on the coffee table to watch tv, and within minutes, the teen would begin to pace irregularly outside the door to the room. Then few minutes later, to pass through the room on his way to do… whatever it was he did before stalking Rick’s movements became his day job. Then he’d take a seat in an armchair across the room finally, and pretend to watch the tv.

Eventually Rick will get bored and move on to the next room, and the cycle will begin again. Morty never gets too close though, he seems to have learned his lesson from Rick’s first night, reinforced a couple times when he sat got bold enough to sit on the couch beside Rick only to have his grandfather almost immediately stand up and walk off.

A couple of times Rick’s put him to work, clearing boxes from his new ‘bedroom’ or carrying in his possessions from the ship’s pocket dimension as he sets up shop in the garage. He’s uncoordinated as all hell, but not actively clumsy or careless, and Rick appreciates the difference. Plus the kid just lights up like a Christmas tree at the prospect of being useful, and who is he to turn his nose up at free unskilled labor?

Most of the time it’s just the two of them, but the evenings are a joy straight out of a 1980’s sitcom without the laugh track to cut the tension. And afterwards… Rick ends up staying up later and later, forgoing sleep when he can. The dreams have gotten infinitely more intense.

It’s the morning after one he couldn’t avoid that finds him tinkering at his new workbench when he feels a familiar prickling in the back of his neck, and turns to see Morty sitting quietly on the bench across from him, hands tucked under his legs, a respectful three meters away. He can’t remember the last time he had a dream without that presence lurking in the back of his skull the whole time. It’s no wonder he’s gotten used to the boy skulking about so quickly.

It’s not the most comfortable companionship, but Rick has to admit, it is easy.

Sometimes Morty disappears too though, most often to not-so-subtly jerk off in his room or just outside the door, sending distracting and unwanted bursts of arousal through Rick’s system as he tries to concentrate. He's still refused to touch himself since he arrived in this house. That’s a problem that’s going to have to be solved sooner rather than later, Morty’s either a little _too_ attentive when Rick's feeling pent up, or he vanishes for entire afternoons at a time.

Like right now.

Rick knocks on the door to Morty’s room, already steeling himself for the possible responses.

Silence.

Counting to five and squeezing his eyes mostly shut, Rick opens the door and peeks in. It’s empty.

Of course, the one time he actually needs the little shit his shadow up and disappears into thin air.

Entering the room, Rick looks around with moderate interest. Fairly typical teenage boy’s bedroom, a little sparsely decorated maybe but stinking of sweat and pheromones. He can practically taste the mattress from here.

Interestingly there’s a poster for Carl Sagan’s _Cosmos_ above the bed, as well as a promotional poster for something called _Planet Earth II_. The bookshelf at the foot of the bed is entirely lacking in actual books, with a few comic books piled neatly on the top shelf next to a half-completed model of a space shuttle. The rest is almost entirely filled with trophies and medals.

Intrigued despite himself, Rick reads the writing on the plaques. They’re all for running, cross-country mostly, though there are two medals for the Seattle Children’s Marathon side by side for last year and the year before. Everything on the shelves is coated with a layer of dust though, clearly Morty hasn’t picked up his father’s knack for obsessively polishing his participation trophies.

Avoiding the hazmat zones of clothes on the floor, Rick picks at the piles of papers on the desk. Old copies of Scientific American are clipped and highlighted, with cramped notes in the margins. Most of the papers seem to be drawing paper though, with a couple of sketchbooks on the bottom.

Flipping open the first one he finds, Rick finds a pile of rough charcoal sketches of dummies in various positions and postures, all with varying levels of detail to the limbs and faces. It looks like a courtroom sketch artist’s reporting of a rave at a mannequin factory, but he has to admit, there’s more than a glimmer of talent to some of them.

Landscapes in bright colors done in pencil take up the remainder of the book, and not a single one is drawn from life. A dozen species take up small spaces in the margins, but the cities and mountains, space stations and mines are all places Rick recognizes from his own memories. Most of them are from the last ten years, but one of the cities hasn’t existed since it was razed by the Federation twenty-odd years ago.

The next book is older and less interesting, full of more sketches, from the family dog to shadow studies of various household objects at different times of day. The last is a forest green leather book that looks newer and more expensive than the others, and it falls open to its most recent drawing.

The half-finished pencil studies and messy charcoal sketches are nowhere to be seen. Instead the drawings are all carefully lined in black ink with a neat hand. Thin translucent sheets of paper have been slid between some of the newer drawings to keep them from smearing, and every single page is covered with his own image.

Rick lounging on the couch. Rick’s back, hunched over a project in the garage. Rick at the breakfast table, shoveling eggs into his mouth and staring directly ahead through the page. He remembers that morning last week.

He doesn’t make eye contact with the kid when he can help it still, the little jolts Rick gets as his eyes slide past his face by accident are bad enough, prolonged and direct eye contact just gives him a headache and a powerful craving for a drink. But Morty hadn’t stopped staring at him to blink, let alone eat his own meal, so Rick had given in to the childish impulse to turn it into a staring contest he could win.

After only a couple of minutes the teen had excused himself and run upstairs to his room, leaving Rick to eat in victorious peace, ignoring his own persistent half-chub and the complicated tangle of something trying to crawl its way out of the pit in the back of his skull he’d shoved it into for safekeeping.

Rick’s eyes in the drawing are piercing, the lines around them hard and challenging. In fact the detail in most of the drawings is impressive. Not hyper-realistic, but chosen well enough to highlight certain telling elements. The length of Rick’s fingers, the movement of his shoulders as he runs a hand through his hair, the twist of his mouth as he watches Morty from the corner of his eye.

But the images aren’t just from his stay at the Smith house. There’s an image of him leaning back in his ship with his hands under his head, staring through the ceiling at an unseen expanse of stars, a bottle perched lazily in his right hand, and another of him with in motion, charging up a hill as he raises a plasma rifle to his shoulder.

Rick can’t place those moments, and the absence of familiarity feels odd after the landscapes and slice of life drawings. He looks at the one with the plasma rifle for longer than the others, trying to jog a memory of something inconsequential that might have happened years ago.

He does look younger in the drawings, less tired and hard behind the eyes than in the one at the breakfast table. Rick starts to notice other differences too. The muscles in his thighs bulge a little against pants that are slightly too tight to be practical. The smile on his face is a little off, more rogueish than in real life. There’s mud smeared on his face and boots, instead of blood.

Rick’s had his share of being objectified over the years, even relished in it a few times, but the image that Morty’s created here is targeted, tactical. And still eerily familiar in its own way…

That familiar prickling starts in the back of his neck again, and Rick turns to find Morty standing in the doorway, his shock at finding the object of his stalkerish affections in his space screaming from his body language. He’s wearing gym shorts and dripping with sweat, and his eyes aren’t fixed on Rick for once, but the sketchbook in his hands.

“H-Hi, Rick. What… What are you doing here?”

Rick wonders if Morty came by his nervous stammer naturally, or if he inherited it from Rick. The answer is probably buried in the timeline of the medical file under his cot. ‘Section 4: Physiological Development, Subsection 7: Speech Impediment’.

Closing the green notebook and tossing it carelessly back on the desk, he watches as Morty visibly relaxes, before his eyes dart to the pillow on his bed. Rick snags a look as he pulls out his flask, noticing the dark outline of yet another sketchbook poking out from a corner.

Christ, he’s got to teach the kid how to have a poker face.

“W-Whatddya think, Morty. I need your help with something.”

There’s that hundred watt glow again at the prospect of helping, practically oozing out of every pore. “Sure thing, Rick! Lemme just shower off and I’ll meet you in the garage, ok?”

Rick shakes his head, tucking the flask away and fishing in his coat..

“Nah, I’m- I’m behind schedule waiting for you to turn up. You don’t need to shower.”

Morty wrinkles his nose a little, but any faint protests he might have disappear when he sees Rick pull out the portal gun. He doesn’t ask any stupid questions as the older man fires a portal on his wall and steps through, just hurries after him with a giddy grin, tripping over his own feet as he emerges onto the concrete on the other side.

Marplex Ventura is a commercial cityscape planet, but this part of the pole is fairly quiet, comparatively. It’s chilly, and the narrows streets and dull skyscrapers create wind tunnels, blasting the inhabitants with brutal gusts of arctic wind, encouraging them to get where they’re going, or perhaps stop off at one of the small restaurants, bars, and seedier establishments that line the ground and first subterranean floors.

Rick takes another bracing drink from his flask and eyes Morty. It’s the teen’s first time off-planet, but he seems to be holding up well. He’s nearly naked, and soaked in sweat that must be freezing, but his cheeks are pink and he’s looking around at the neon and concrete squalor like it’s Yellowstone park.

Fortunately they don’t have far to go. Half a block away Rick keys in a code to a door, and steps through, holding the door open a moment for Morty to get the hint to follow, too busy trying to translate the mysteries of a sign written in Garblockian. It says ‘no service for quadrupeds or higher’, and it’s hung on the side of a low-rent whorehouse, but Rick figures he’ll save the realities of intergalactic racism for the next trip.

They walk up thirteen flights of stairs past the perpetually-busted freight elevator, then down a bleak orange hallway for a few minutes until they arrive at another door Rick has the code for. It slides open to reveal a small, rectangular room full of boxes and tarp-covered tables. Pushing a gelatinous button, the room is flooded with harsh but dim light.

“Try- Try not to touch too much,” Rich belches. “I’m gonna need to you to carry some of this stuff in a few minutes though. Can’t finish most of the projects I have going with what I had in the ship.”

Morty half-stands, half-leans against a wall, surveying a table that seems to have something bubbling under its tarp.

“Does this mean that... you’re staying?”

Rick grunts an affirmative.

The next few minutes pass quickly, Rick pulls out an empty box and starts chucking various pieces of equipment and supplies into it. Eventually however, he stands up from the third box he’s rifled through and kicks it, cursing under his breath.

“Never can find shit in this goddamn mess.”

“Can I help?”

He turns to face the teen, scowling idly. “I don’t suppose you know what a Telurkian Defragmentation Matrix looks like, do you.”

Morty blinks. “Um… Actually I think I might?”

Rick stares at him, disbelieving.

“Is it… is it like a purple crystal potato? With like, nubbly things coming out where the eyes would be?”

“Son of a bitch,” the scientist mutters. "That’s about thirty-percent accurate, but… basically, yeah. Kind of. Just be… careful.”

He turns to sort through another box in the back of the room and Morty cautiously opens the one nearest his feet, gingerly sorting through it. When Rick turns around a few minutes later, still no closer to finding what he’s been looking for, the boy has moved on to another box.

Almost immediately he’s certain it’s not the right one. It’s filled with personal effects. A dusty metal helmet that’s covered in netting, some leather wristbands, soft and clearly well-broken in, and at the bottom a crumpled diploma that’s too badly water-stained to be read. Morty’s clearly entranced, sorting through each item like they’ll crack the code to the earth-shattering secrets of the racist whorehouse sign outside.

“What do you want, Morty?”

Rick hadn’t meant to ask that, especially not so aggressively, but there’s no time like the present. The boy looks genuinely puzzled by the question.

“What do you mean?”

Rick stands up and gestures around the room.

“I’ve lived my life already. Clearly. I’ve done the whole ‘have a kid, plant a tree…’ what is it, ‘write a book’? Fuck, I’ve probably gotten high and done that too. Plus a ton of way better shit that just doesn’t make the list.”

Morty just continues to sit on the floor of the storage unit, watching him patiently.

Sighing, Rick tries to make his point again. “There’s nothing to build on here, Morty. The soil’s been stripped bare. What do you want out of a life? Because I sure as fuck can’t give it to you.”

The teen closes the box reverently. Rick notices him pocket something with minimal skill as he does, but can’t be bothered to deal with it when Morty answers: “I want to spend my life with you.”

Exasperated at the thoughtless reply, Rick pinches the bridge of his nose. “That is the dumbest goddamn thing I have ever heard in my life, and last night Jerry talked about the Avatar sequels for two straight hours.”

Morty shrugs, seemingly satisfied with his final answer. Pulling another box off a pile, he opens it and pulls out a disintegration grenade. It activates at the the skin-to-metal contact, lighting up and starting a rapid countdown.

Before Rick can even move, Morty grips it in exactly the right place and presses the catch to send it back into sleep mode, setting it down gently before looking up at him with triumph.

“I’ve been preparing for this my whole life. And I’m going to be good at it.”

Rick manages to keep his expression somewhere between exasperation and condescension. “And when I’m dead?”

Morty just smiles enigmatically again, looking down into the box.

“Oh look, I found the crystal potato-thing.” He holds it out to Rick, who ignores the offer and jerks his head towards the box on the floor.

“We’re ready to go then. And it barely looks like a potato.”

Climbing to his feet, Morty picks up the heavy box and follows Rick back into the hall. As they make their way back down the stairs, the box shifts, bunching up Morty’s sweat-soaked running gear.

Rick can see the edge of a familiar leather cuff sticking out of his shorts pocket, and it suddenly all clicks.

The drawings. Tight pants and leather cuffs. Muddy boots and lovingly recreated weapons that hardly get a second glance. The way Morty’s never so much as commented on his drinking, or petty and not-so-petty crime, and nods at him over the breakfast table after the worst of the nightmares.  

He knows why those rogueish grins look familiar now. The kid thinks he’s Han fucking Solo. A bad boy with a heart of gold, just waiting to be whipped into the right level of shape by true love and a cause.

That’s why Morty isn’t worried about the future. He thinks he’s goddamn Princess Leia. Rick has no idea how he’s going to go about convincing him that there’s nothing under the surface. At least, nothing good. Of course Morty doesn’t seriously think about him dying. Romantic heroes never do. Because they’re total horseshit.

They make it back to the alley and portal straight into the garage, dropping their armloads of spoils on the workbench.

“Can I ask _you_ something?” Morty suddenly speaks up, not waiting for an uncertain answer. “Why are you here?”

Rick avoids the complications of direct eye-contact, but tells the truth.

“Because there was nowhere else left to go.”

 

* * *

 

A few days later, Morty finds Rick on the couch and screws up all his courage.

“Rick?”

The older man doesn’t look away from the TV when he entered the room, but Morty’s fairly certain he’s gotten his attention. “D-do you remember a few days ago, when you asked me what I wanted?”

Rick is still facing the TV, but a note of tension enters his posture.

“Yeah, you rethink your answer yet?”

Ignoring the jab, Morty holds out the open sketchbook he’s been clutching. Rick doesn’t reach out to take it, so he ends up half-dropping it in his lap.

“I want to go here.”

The drawing on the page is done in bright colored pencils that cover an entire sheet. It’s a landscape straight out of Dr. Seuss, with rolling blue hills and an orange sky filled with planets. The trees are topped with foliage that look like warped beehives, and in the background a delicately-spired city of colored glass rises.

Morty’s drawn this particular landscape several times, over several years. It’s one of the first places he could ‘see’ in his mind’s eye with any level of clarity and detail, and he finds himself coming back to it again and again. This version is one of his more popular posts on Instagram actually.

Rick, to his credit, picks up the drawing and scrutinizes it for a good minute, before shaking his head.

“Doesn’t ring a bell. Sorry kid, you got a second choice?”

More than a little crushed, Morty sags. He’d prepared himself for a whole range of negative responses, from flat-out denials to lazy evasions that made it clear he wasn’t worth Rick’s time. But one possibility that hadn’t occurred to him was that the world that had occupied so much of his life, his time, his obsession, hadn’t even made enough of an impression on Rick to be worthy of remembering.

He really should have known. If there’s one thing that’s becoming more and more apparent every day, it’s that Rick’s experience is vast and varied beyond comprehension, and the snippets and fragments he’s managed to piece together over the years barely even scratch the surface.

Rick, on the other hand, has pretty much figured out his whole life in a month, neatly packaged in a pile of lovestruck sketchbooks and a shelf of running trophies he’d collected to make his dad happy.

“Nevermind,” he mutters. “S-sorry, it was stupid.”

He tries to tug the pad from his grandfather’s hands, but Rick refuses to yield it, dodging his hands with the skill he’s perfected the last few weeks and flipping through the landscapes until he finds another one. “Is this the same place?”

A sandstone arch rises out of the ground, with a living eye growing out of it, and tendons wrapped around the columns.

“Yeah, I-I think so,” Morty says. “Why, do you know it?”

Rick looks up with a fiendish grin, his eyes dancing.

“Oh yeah,” he purrs. “I know it.”

Fifteen minutes later Morty is in another dimension, walking across a parallel version of Earth that he’d always assumed to be an alien world. By the literal definitions he supposes it still is, but after so many years of recreating it, it feels more familiar than half of the schools he’s attended.

And the best part is Rick, strolling beside him as he takes in _everything_ , every detail he’s ever missed or gotten wrong, grinning that carefree grin.

Apparently this version of Earth has a particular kind of tree Rick had spotted in the background of his sketch, with powerful seeds that do… something. Morty was too happy to pay attention to the details. So they’re both sporting burlap sacks to fill with the ‘Megaseeds’ when they find them.

Maybe he should be a little annoyed at his special trip being hijacked by another one of Rick’s ‘errands’, but with Rick in a good mood too it’s impossible to care.

Rick was right. It’s everything Morty has ever wanted, and he never would have thought to ask.

They’re even talking. A real, back-and-forth conversation, though it mostly consists of Rick asking questions about other things Morty’s seen and remembered through the dreams and Morty answering them as best he can.

“...just can’t believe you’ve spend a decade stealing thoughts from the most highly sought after brain in the universe, and you’ve come away with nothing more classified that my favorite brand of soda.”

Morty snickers. “Well I also know exactly how you like a finger up your ass while you’re getting head.”

“Ah yes, the important things,” Rick nods. “You’ve truly focused in like a laser. Why bother with the recipe for concentrated dark matter when there are hormones in play.”

“Maybe you just dream more about getting fucked than you do about chemical formulas,” he shoots back.

“Yeah well thank fuck I don’t have to hand over the remote and watch your dreams,” Rick retorts, shaking his head. “One week of junior-high redheads showing me their tits and I’d be ready to punch a hole ear-to-ear if you know what I mean.”

For the first time in years he can remember, Morty honest-to-god throws his head back and laughs.

 

* * *

 

_Searing pain rips through Rick’s side with every footfall, each step jarring through his nervous system and sending white-hot bursts of agony jolting through his whole body. He doesn’t stop running though, keeping as much pressure as he can on the gunshot wound on his side._

_It’s a losing battle, his hand and sweater are already soaked, and he’s doing next to nothing to stem the flow from the entry wound his back. His head is aching, he’s sweating far more than he should for a sprint like this, and he’s starting to get dizzy. Fuck, hypervolemic shock is definitely setting in._

_Rick glances to his side to make sure Morty is still with him. He is, trailing about ten feet behind, and swaying a bit himself. That’s not good. The kid’s a better runner than Rick ever was, even without the added handicaps of old age and a gutshot. He should be tearing out ahead while Rick tries to cover them, getting to the ship and powering it up already._

_Another glance back catches Morty bringing his hand up to hold his own side, wincing in sympathetic pain and nausea._

_Cursing, Rick stumbles again and collapses to the ground, ducking behind a mound of dirt until he’s certain he’s out of sight. A few seconds later Morty tumbles into his makeshift foxhole with him, panting and out of breath._

_Ah. That means he’s out of breath then. Rick checks his pulse and finds it’s already thready, barely there even though his heart is going a mile a minute._

_He reaches for his flask, but it isn’t there. Just like his portal gun._

_Why aren’t they there? Fuck it’s getting hard to think._

_“Morty,” he says, and tastes blood. Double Fuck._

_“Morty, you have to get to the ship. It’s our only chance.”_

_‘Your only chance’ he really thinks. It’s a quarter mile to the ship, and he’s barely taught the kid how to fly the damn thing. No way he’d make it back to him in time. But at least she can protect him and get him back to Earth with basic voice commands. His only future involves trying to die before the… whatever the fuck they are that’s shooting at them catches them._

_What was chasing them again?_

_He should know this. Must be the blood loss. Goddamnit, dying sucks._

_Morty’s not running though, just shaking his head and crying._

_“I-I c-can’t, Rick,” he sobs. “It hurts so bad.”_

_The boy is curled beside him, clutching his side and his head, trying to lean against Rick’s good side for comfort. Rick wishes he had some to give._

_He tries his best to focus his energy on shutting down the pain he’s sending through the bond, but that isn’t something he’s ever really gotten the hang of._

_It can’t be that hard though. He barely hurts anymore._

_Focusing is tough, though. His head is so light. At least it’s stopped throbbing._

_Distantly some part of him that’s still snarling reminds him that that isn’t a good thing. That must have been the part that was firing back earlier._

_Where’s his gun?_

_Eh, he must have dropped it._

_Morty’s gone quiet beside him, and Rick lets the boy curl further into him, pulling his arm down around his shoulders._

_He’s so warm, and it feels so good where he’s holding Rick’s hand. His shoulders are still shaking a little with quiet sobs, but Rick doesn’t know what to do about that. He tries to reach his other hand up to brush against the boy’s cheek, but it doesn’t move when he tells it to._

_The sound of gunfire has ceased above them, replaced by the distant but closing sounds of troops, sweeping the area for their measly hidey-hole._

_“Morty,” Rick slurs, one more time. “You hav’ta run…”_

_There’s no response. The teen just buries his face further in Rick’s chest._

_Rick can see him squeezing his hand tight enough to hurt, but he can’t feel it. He can’t feel anything anymore._

_He suddenly realizes that he can’t feel his heart pounding weakly in his chest anymore, doesn’t hear his own labored breathing._

_His mind feels clearer too._

_Ah shit, he’s dead. Or some form of advanced dying._

_‘Morty, get up and run you little dipshit!’ Rick shouts, but there’s no sound, no vocal cords under his control for him to move._

_Even the lump of chemical-secreting meat in his skull that housed his genius and tied him by more than blood to the boy beside him is useless now, firing off all those thousands of chemical combinations that come with a dying mind. Life’s last fireworks show, and he doesn’t even get to enjoy it._

_Morty doesn’t move though, hasn’t moved since the last time Rick spoke out loud. Since before he died._

_Rick wonders if he’s going through that massive chemical dump for Rick, swimming in so many endorphins and hormones it’s basically pickling his brain._

_Or more likely, he’s just snapped off without the input from the bond, never having experienced life without it._

_Less than half of a pair, Rick’s left him half of a person._

_The sound of military boots following an obvious trail of blood and footprints grows louder, clearer. Rick can hear somebody shouting orders to fan out and surround them._

_‘Morty just move,’ Rick pleads, a tone in his voice he’s sure was never there when he was alive._

_‘Come on, just move. Please. Just get up and go on.’_

_It’s too late anyway. The grass in the distance is starting to rustle as their pursuers close in._

_Morty never moves._

 

* * *

 

It couldn’t last, of course.

Rick knew it couldn’t, in the same fundamental, abstract way he knows that death is an inevitability.

And like death, he’d shoved it in the back of his mind to allow himself to get through the day to day monotony of existence, placating himself with trite promises.

_It’ll come, so don’t worry about it._

_It’ll come, but when it does, it’ll be on your own terms._

_You can’t stop it, but you can control the how, and the where._

Maybe it’d happen pulling Morty aside from a bullet headed straight for him, inches away from putting the silence back in Rick’s head for good.

Maybe on the night he finally cracks from those _goddamn dreams_ and fucks the boy insensible, letting them both wallow in the empty feedback loop of sex and hormones.

Or maybe, just maybe, he thought he’d be able to hold out. To wind up dying in a hospital bed on the citadel, smashing the morphine button on repeat like Lazarus Long, giving the kid one long kiss goodnight on his way out. One for the road.

But in the end Rick doesn’t even get to keep the illusion of control. It happens because of his own damn carelessness. Because he got too comfortable, got fucking sloppy.

He just barks at Morty to fetch him something from a box on top of the shelves while they’re in the garage one rainy afternoon, and spends his last moments seething with impatience at the sounds of incompetent shuffling behind him. He throws down the soldering iron and half-storms across the room, rolling his eyes at Morty’s precarious perch, one foot dangling off the stepstool as he buries his arm blindly in a box of weapons that could easily melt it off with the wrong click of a button.

Without thinking, Rick braces the box back on its shelf with one hand, and with the other he grabs the teen’s arm and tugs him back down to the floor.

Morty stumbles backwards with his typical lack of grace, his eyes and jaw widening comically as the bond slams open before he hits the ground, kept steady only by the hand wrapped around his arm.

The last two thoughts Rick knows to be his and his alone happen quickly, one right on top of the other.

The first is that at least the whole thing was quick.

The last is that this figures; he’s never managed to pull the trigger either.

Then the bond hits him, full force, slamming through his brain and sending every alarm in his nervous and endocrine systems into hyperdrive.

He’s aware of his presence, his consciousness in the way that only really good psychedelics have managed before, emanating out from his brain into said systems and beyond with a defined, clear tone that he recognizes as uniquely his own, at least within this dimension.

_I’m Here._

And there, in the distance, is an echoing tone, mimicking his own like the high-tinged return of a radar ping.

_Me too._

It’s as clear as anything he’s ever heard, but he can’t quite tell if he’s processing it with his ears or not. The blood pumping through them right now makes hearing anything seem impossible.

Morty turns his head to face him, not bothering to fix the awkward positioning he’s ended up in, as if fixing his eyes on Rick’s is the most important thing he can do in this moment.

If laying eyes on Morty for the first time set off a choir, then this is a full 90-piece orchestra. Not the orderly, structured sounds of a symphony being played, but the cacophony of an orchestra tuning their instruments before the curtain rises, each playing nonsensical bars of disparate music and unconnected notes. Some can be picked out, filtered from the noise, even identified.

There’s the thudding timpani of a heartbeat, racing in counterpoint with his own. The high, fluttering sound of flutes and oboes, full of shock and elation, skitter around and refuse to stay still. The deep, throbbing arousal of the brass section, occasionally interrupted by clashing cymbals of anxiety.

Those are in turn are chased away by the swelling sounds of strings, violins and cellos, rising and falling with a rhythm that feels like acceptance and quiet joy, a rainfall after a decade of drought. And beneath it all there’s the complex melody of a piano, one quiet enough beneath the din that Rick can’t quite isolate it enough to pin down.

The symphony roars to life, and it’s as if they’ve been idly practicing until now, waiting for that signal, that radar ping that is Rick’s mind to begin playing in earnest, their conductor and audience finally having arrived.

It’s overwhelming, and the piece of Rick that has always loved the puzzle of a complex system howls with delight, already wanting to categorize and take the whole thing apart, to put it back together in a more organized and efficient manner, but he silences it. His first priority is now to learn how to deafen the noise in his head. It was never quiet enough in there to begin with.

He has no idea how long they’ve been standing there, but his arm is starting to ache above him where he’s still holding the box that started this in place. The rest of the world starts to come back to him, as the volume on the orchestra lowers enough for him to recognize the fall of rain on cement.

Morty’s arm hurts where he’s gripping it too tightly, he knows that, can feel the ache in his own upper right arm if he focuses on it, but he also knows, with another blast of trombones and french horns, that the teen likes it, more than a little.

There’s a flash in Morty’s head then, the first clear image he’s received that isn’t just a tangle of noise and emotion. It’s a fantasy, a desire for Rick to squeeze harder, to leave a bruise on his arm that will last for days, weeks even. A secondary, temporary mark from his soulmate to celebrate their bonding.

Rick can see the colors that the bruise would turn, the places where his fingerprints would be distinct, the purples and yellows and greens, peeking out beneath the sleeve of the t-shirts his bondmate always favors.

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/164401073@N04/29570885617/)

Arousal and newfound possession flares in his gut, as the desire layers over his own like a translucent film, tingeing his own thoughts with Morty’s. He shakes them away, shoving the godforsaken noise in the darkest recesses of his mind and frowning. Morty’s wants and emotions are gone, but it leaves behind his own want, stripped bare and clearly visible.

To both of them, apparently. Morty’s knees buckle a little, and the back of Rick’s mind floods with newly discovered emotions.

Relief. Disbelief. Self-doubt. Renewed bursts of shock and elation.

“You want me,” Morty whispers, and they’re the damning first words of Rick’s new life.

He can’t lie now. Can he lie?

His second priority is learning how to lie.

Every emotion behind the teen’s face is fighting for space on it, and he brings his hand to his ears.

“Rick,” he whines, lowly. “It’s so loud…”

Rick shoves the damn box and crouches down to Morty’s level, automatically bringing his other hand up to rest on the boy’s other shoulder. This feels so natural, after denying himself for so long it should still feel strange to touch him, shouldn’t it?

“Morty,” he says, trying to gain the boy’s attention. His pupils and body language are fixed on Rick, but Rick gets the feeling that nobody’s minding the front of the store right now. There’s a glassy sheen to his eyes, and he seems to be looking right past him. “Morty, you need to snap out of it.”

“It’s so loud, Rick,” the boy repeats, bringing his own hands up to clutch at his grandfather’s wrists, panic starting to tinge his words. “It’s so much. It’s too loud…”

“Shhhhhhh,” Rick soothes automatically, pulling up the orchestra in the back of his head again and wincing at the growing discord. The clash of anxiety is almost constant now, drowning out the rest.

Taking stock of his own emotions, he tries to quiet anything he might be sending, but it doesn’t seem to help. Rick moves to take his hands away, hoping that might lessen the intensity of the transmission, but the crash of cymbals grows so loud the second he reduces the pressure of his hands he immediately stops, squeezing harder. He might just end up giving Morty those bruises after all.

Wait, that’s it.

Rick rifles through his memories as quickly as he can, trying not to focus on any of them. He’s pathetically short on those that might be considered ‘soothing’. His happy place is an arcade for fuck’s sake.

Eventually he settles on Earth 35-C, doing his best to broadcast a clear image of the landscape, and hoping to hell the positive memories the kid has of the place do something to calm him down.

They do, and Morty’s face goes peaceful and relaxed almost scarily fast. The cymbals silence entirely, and the strings and that strange piano piece start to take precedence. Rick listens for a minute longer until uneasiness starts to creep over him again.

He breaks Morty’s hold with ease and stands up, ignoring the slight protest he can hear in his head and from the boy’s lips as he does, and buries his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. He was right, without skin-to-skin contact it’s much easier to ignore the sounds and emotions in his head. Rick can shove it aside and almost forget about it, like mandatory software that came with a computer he can minimize but not uninstall as it runs in the background.

Morty still looks a little dazed, smiling dopily up at Rick. Pulses of stronger emotion ping in the back of Rick’s head like notifications, and he ignores them. He’ll stay out of Morty’s head as much as possible, and he’s definitely keeping Morty out of his.

Impulsively, Rick pulls out his portal gun and steps through to the first random world he has programmed, closing it quickly behind him.

In the back of his head his new radar still pings, almost imperceptibly if he doesn’t listen for it.

_I’m here._

He’s not alone any more. He’ll never be alone again.


	4. Roche Lobe Overflow

**Roche Lobe Overflow:** As a main sequence star increases in size during its development, its mass may exceed its own gravitational influence within the Roche Lobe. In the case of binary stars, matter will be transferred from the overlapping star to its counterpart, either through an accretion disk or gravitational siphoning.

 

* * *

 

It takes less than a week for Rick to make his way back to the Smith house. If the little fuck had been worried or concerned by his absence he doesn’t show it, just glances up at Rick and smiles in acknowledgment as the older man materializes in the living room before turning his attention back to the TV.

Rick ignores the swell of emotions he’s rapidly learning to categorize that radiate from the couch.

Of course he wasn’t concerned. He’s got what every intergalactic agent and bounty hunter in the multiverse dreams of: a permanent tracker on _the_ Rick Sanchez.

He knew Rick would be back because he’d been stupid enough to tell him as much weeks ago.

And he knew Rick wasn’t hurt or ever in any danger the same way Rick knows the kid hasn’t had a single nightmare wake him while he was gone.

The dream-sharing is getting out of hand, though. He’s sleeping less again, but it’s a fine line. Morty’s teenage penchant for sleeping ten hours a night is starting to get to him, and if he ignores it and powers through the boy ends up lethargic and more prone to stupid mistakes and slip-ups than usual.

A stray flash of memory intrudes on Rick’s mindscape, the image of Morty sitting over his cooling corpse with unnatural stillness as-

Frowning, he shakes his head, only to have the dream replaced by another from last night, of Morty riding his cock ecstatically in the confines of the ship while a supernova implodes behind him.

His shielding isn’t what it should be yet, or he’s just more transparent than he thinks, because Morty shifts obviously on the couch, his breathing shifting an octave higher and his mind filling the back of Rick’s head with desperate _need_.

It would be easier, so much easier, if those desires had simply been sexual.

Rick turns and walks out of the living room to the garage, gaining the meager protections that sheetrock and thirty feet provide.

 

* * *

 

It takes time, but the next few weeks eventually fall back into an easy rhythm like the one they’d had _before_.

The differences are the casual touches that happen now, the slip of fingers against fingers as Morty passes him a tool or a drink, the manhandling on adventures that is less careful to stay on clothed skin, and on one notable occasion after a particularly rough adventure that left Morty more broken up than he knew how to voice aloud, an honest-to-god hug. Each touch still brings the bond roaring back to the surface, but it’s easier to live with every day, and Morty suspects that at least half the ‘accidental’ contact is actually Rick’s method of testing and desensitization.

The other difference is the notable tension that enters the air whenever they both recognize one of those newly defined shared experiences start to creep in.

Exhaustion.

Rick stops looking at him directly, the line of his shoulders growing tenser and more hunched by the second, the progress he’s making on a project invariably slowing to a trickle. Eventually Morty cracks first, leaving without a word of goodbye as quietly and inoffensively as he can, as if every inch of Rick’s attention wasn’t on him.

He lies in bed as long as he can, trying to force himself awake until he recognizes some change, but Morty always falls asleep first. It doesn’t matter though. Rick is always there by the time he enters REM sleep.

He almost thinks Rick prefers the ones full of violence and death over Morty’s favorites, which are always of a more carnal and undeniably _intimate_ nature.

And so it goes.

They go on adventures, Morty helps Rick with his projects or whatever else he decides is worth his attention that day, and they don’t talk about the dreams.

Today is special though. Rick has taken him for the first time to the Citadel of Ricks, and Morty’s jaw is practically on the floor. He can sense Rick’s amusement at the cavalcade of excitement and wonder he’s putting off, and he keeps a close watch on it as he fires off questions in rapid succession.

“How many Ricks and Mortys live on the Citadel, Rick?”

“I-I-I don’t know, Morty. Ricks aren’t exactly thrilled about census-takers. A lot, does it matter?”

“A-and they all have Mortys? Even that one?”

He points to a Rick that vaguely resembled a pile of kumquats on steroids.

“Yeah, probably. If he didn’t naturally he probably got assigned one, anyway.”

Frowning, Morty drops his arm. “Assigned? You mean they aren’t real partners?”

“Keep an eye out for an information kiosk,” Rick belches, reaching for his flask. “I-I’m pretty sure there’s a first-timer FAQ pamphlet for Mortys they print out to save time.”

Rick’s keeping something from him, but since he learned to keep his walls up Morty hasn’t been able to penetrate more than skin-deep if Rick doesn’t want him to while they’re both awake. And Morty has never seen Rick sleep while he hasn’t.

Dropping the subject, he follows Rick away from the main plazas and into a shabbier part of town. Eventually Rick stops in front of a dusty store that looks like it actually still sells paper books.

“The Library of Al-Rick-sandria?” Morty reads disbelievingly.

“Yeah, I know,” Rick scoffs. "I-I've told him it doesn’t work as a visual pun, but this guy’s a stubborn asshole.”

They walk through the door to find a Rick in a black turtleneck with matching dark circles under his eyes typing away at a laptop behind the desk. Rick clears his throat, but the Rick behind the desk ignores him for a good thirty seconds while he appears to finish writing his thought.

“Ah, S-491…” The Rick drawls, deigning to look up above his screen. “Here to finally pick up the order you placed last month?”

“Is that anyway to talk to one of the few regular customers you have left in this sentimental shithole?” Rick bites back.

Sensing this might take a while, Morty wanders off for the brightly colored corner of the store cheerfully, if a little patronizingly, labeled ‘Morty Fiction’.

He isn’t surprised to find most of the books there are actually fairly interesting, and he settles into a pile of science textbooks that aren’t quite low-level enough to be demeaning.

Eventually though there’s a tug in the back of his head that means Rick’s summoning him, and he trots back to the counter. He holds up the books on inorganic chemistry and quantum physics questioningly, and Rick nods, jerking his head for Morty to throw them on the counter.

Handing Morty a pile of books wrapped in brown-paper and twine, (Man, was this Rick a hipster or what) Rick turns back to the shopkeeper.

“How much for the textbooks?”

“You’re kidding right? No Morty actually reads that stuff.”

“Yeah, well just because your Morty’s an imbecile doesn’t mean the rest of us put up with that.”

Biting down on the small kernel of pride Morty feels, he quietly takes his parcel of books and slips outside as his Rick argues for a discount.

The street outside is fairly quiet, but a gaggle of Mortys wander past, giggling over a magazine they’re passing between themselves. One holds one up above his head to let a centerfold fall out, and Morty frowns as something registers as off.

It takes a moment, but he realizes. The Morty doesn’t have a Soul Mark. In fact none of the Mortys do. Do Marks appear later in other dimensions? Or somewhere else on the body that’s covered?

There’s another possibility that’s starting to creep onto the edges of his mind, held back by tenuous horror, when Morty’s distracted by a voice near his ear.

“First time on the Citadel?”

He jumps, tightening his hold on the package in his arms, and turning. The voice is a Rick’s, but he hasn’t had time to adjust to the sound of Rick’s voice without the corresponding emotions and physical sensations that it always sets off when it does. Hearing it without, especially unexpectedly, feels like hearing a ghost.

“Uh… Y-yeah. How did you know?”

The Rick smiles, and it’s charming, but it still makes the back of Morty’s neck prickle. He shoves the sensation away. He’s not prejudiced against blobs that ooze acidic piss, and he’s not going to let himself be prejudiced against other versions of his bondmate. Besides, this Rick looks friendly enough, if a little worn-down around the edges. He’s wearing a worn brown leather jacket in place of the usual lab coat and his five o’clock shadow is just rogueish enough to send a bit of a thrill through Morty’s stomach.

“I can always tell. Bit of a party trick. Another one is I’m pretty good at sussing out dimensions… Now let me guess…” The Rick purses his lips and narrows his gaze dramatically, sweeping his eyes over Morty in a way that leaves him just a little too aroused for polite company. Maybe he’s overcorrected on the prejudice thing.

“You look like… an S-Dimension Morty to me, am I right?”

Beaming in amazement, Morty nods. “Yeah, S-491.”

The Rick looks genuinely thrown for a second, then grins twice as wide.

“You’re from a soulmate universe then.”

Morty’s stomach plummets as his unfinished fear is confirmed. He feels his mark, his source of pride and comfort for years, burn against his skin where he presses it into rough creases of the paper.

Where only a moment ago he’d convinced himself he’s been freed of irrational prejudices, he now feels sick to his stomach, close to hyperventilating. All those Ricks and Mortys… all the people on their worlds, their _universes_ , utterly alone… Swells of pity mix with disgust, and he feels Rick, _his Rick_ , in the store behind him poking around in his head trying to figure out what’s caused this latest inconvenient wave of negative emotion.

The Rick next to him is still talking though, with a sympathetic tone, but Morty can barely hear him, definitely can’t register what he’s saying.

Until the Rick’s hand lands on his shoulder, and he jumps, skin crawling and words dying behind his teeth.

“...Morty? It’s ok, I get it… Just breathe. Look, see?”

The Rick’s jacket has been shoved up to his elbow on one arm, and he’s almost gently holding it in front of Morty’s face.

There’s a name, written in careful but still slightly-sloppy block letters etched across the Rick’s arm.

_Morty Smith_

Morty’s breathing starts to even out as he takes in the name, transfixed.

This must be what his Rick’s Mark looks like. He’s never seen it, not outside of shared dreams at least.

The door to the bookshop slams open, and he’s vaguely aware of his Rick all but storming out.

“Get your fucking hand off my Morty or I will spill that whiskey-soaked concoction you call blood all over the fucking sidewalk,” Rick says evenly, venom laced through every word.

The Rick removes his hand from Morty’s shoulder and stands up, raising his hands in mock surrender.

“Hey, S-491. I was wondering when I’d see you again.” That easy, too-charismatic smirk is back on the unknown Rick’s face, and Morty watches dully as it’s directed full force at above his head. “I figured you were about due around these parts.”

“Crawl back into that pit you call a home,” Rick growls, and for a moment his shields drop. Morty feels the full force of the anger, possession, and several other unfamiliar or more nuanced emotions that radiate from him, and notes with interest the lack of jealousy.

Whatever Rick’s problem with this stranger is, that isn’t his concern here. Which he supposes makes sense, if it’s possible this Rick alone among the hundreds they’ve seen today already has his own Morty as a soulmate.

The Rick winks at Morty, and waves goodbye.

“See you around, kid.”

Rick waits until after he turns and walks away to dig his fingers into Morty’s shoulder, watching until he disappears down the street. Silently, he shoves the science textbooks into Morty’s arms and takes off in the opposite direction down the street. Morty follows him.

 

* * *

 

Rick drinks that night.

It isn’t the easy, one-pull-to-another slide of rotating flasks, slowly giving way to the bottles that ultimately refill them. Nor is it the impulsive chugging of a mixed batch of something potent that would usually kick a party into either high gear or Jonestown territory.

This is the steady measured drinking that occurs behind locked doors, bottles lined up like victims at a firing squad, ready to be picked off, ruthlessly and efficiently disposed of one by one.

He ignores the pounding at his bedroom door that’s growing more and more uncoordinated with each bottle that joins the mass grave of empties pooling on the carpet. Harder to ignore are the thoughts and emotions pouring from the other side of that thin piece of hollow plywood he hasn’t reinforced yet for some reason he doesn’t want to examine.

Morty is practically screaming at him, pleading, begging, any and all veneer of shielding or coherency lost to the liquor coursing through their shared bloodstreams.

The little fucker has to pass out at some point, right? Just because he’s been sucking down whiskey by proxy from the time Beth shoved the first bottle of formula in his mouth doesn’t mean he can stand up to almost six decades of functional alcoholism.

Rick’s head is pounding from the effort to keep his own shielding up, silencing the fucking uncoordinated din in the back of his head. The players in Morty’s mental orchestra sound like they’re trying to play despite puking into their trombones and the back of that goddamn piano.

The pounding on the door stops, and Rick feels something like hope rise in his chest. Or maybe it’s those last three fingers of scotch shoving their way down like a bulimic pre-teen girl.

The thoughts and screaming emotions settle and quiet too, until Rick gets a series of vivid, technicolor images, oozing at the edges like the cinematographer had been on a particularly bad acid trip.

_Morty in the bathtub, letting the warm water lull him until he falls asleep from the liquor swamping his brain, slipping under the water unconscious..._

_Morty in the kitchen, making good old-fashioned late-night drunken mac ‘n’ cheese, stumbling as he goes to drain it and spilling the pot of boiling water all over bare feet, arms, legs..._

_Morty in the garage, picking up the first piece of tech he doesn’t recognize and jamming random buttons until-_

Growling, Rick rips open the bedroom door and hisses down at Morty, sitting on the hallway carpet, too drunk to stand under his own volition.

“You think you can threaten me, you little piece of shit? Nobody fucking blackmails me, and especially not with- like you picked up your Dad’s manual on sloppy emotional abuse.”

Morty just blinks blearily and slumps forward against Rick’s legs, rubbing his face against them and sighing into the rough fabric of his pants.

“I hate the dark liquor. The hangovers are the fucking worst.”

Rick’s hand almost automatically comes to rest on the boy’s hair, but he presses it against the doorframe instead. There’s no easy way to explain to the kid that the miserable hangovers are part of the appeal of this form of self-destructive bender, but if he’s conscious sometime in the next thirty-six hours he’ll throw the kid one of this better cure-alls.

“Yeah, well… Vodka wasn’t cutting it tonight.”

Morty slurs something incomprehensible and Rick drags the skinny sack of potatoes he calls his grandson in and heaves him on the cot in an upright position.

Rummaging through his coat pockets, Morty forces his eyes open and studies him.

“What were you thinking about, Rick?”

Rick pulls out a tablet and passes it to Morty. The boy takes it without complaint, wrinkling his nose a bit at the sour pickled flavor it leaves on his tongue.

“Sobriety tablet,” Rick explains. “P-pretty fast acting, but I don’t know how effective it’s going to be on you when you weren’t- when it’s not technically in your bloodstream. Should still help though.”

Blinking a little, Morty nods, sitting up a little straighter. “Yeah, I think I’m down to a six-beer buzz.”

Snorting a little, Rick pulls the cork from his next bottle. “Good. Means I can do this without you puking all over my shit.”

Morty doesn’t respond, simply watching Rick chug half the bottle in one go with a neutral look on his face, his mind quieter now as well.

Rick drinks in silence for a minute, small prickles of irritation starting to raise on the back of his neck. Sure, this is better than a sloppy drunk Morty pounding on his door, but it’s still not the itinerary he had planned for this evening.

“Feel free to get out whenever you want, _Morty_.”

“I’m waiting for you to answer my question,” the teen responds calmly.

“Yeah, w-what question is that then?”

Morty rolls his eyes, and Rick makes a not to only give him half a tablet next time. The kid has bypassed quiet, sleepy drunk and made it all the way back to pain-in-his-ass.

“The one you dodged. Poorly.”

“Oh, that.” Rick takes a swig and calmly drops the bomb. “I was thinking about how to break the bond.”

Of all the possibilities he had imagined, anger, panic, tears, begging… Rick hadn’t expected curiosity.

Morty simply looks thoughtful for a moment, as if weighing all the things he knows against this new information.

“Is that even possible?”

Shrugging, Rick chucks the bottle towards the other empties with the clicking thud of thick glass on thin carpeting.

“There’s p-plenty of anecdotal evidence,” he belches, looking around the room for the rest of his stash. None in sight. “I looked into it a little a couple years ago.”

“When you got the mark,” Morty supplies flatly.

Nodding makes the room spin, but Rick does it anyway. “‘S’all just chemistry.”

“If anyone could, I’m sure it’s you.”

Abandoning the search for more liquor, the scientist turns back to the bane of his existence, squinting at him to bring him into focus.

“You still don’t want me to, do you.”

It isn’t posed as a question, but Morty still shakes his head fast enough to almost make Rick vomit out of sympathy.

Snorting, Rick flops back sideways on the cot, staring up at the cheap popcorn ceiling.

“Yeah, well you’re a moron. It’d be better for you if I did.”

Morty doesn’t respond, for once.

“I’ve seen your notebooks,” Rick adds, settling into a comfortable drunken monologue. “You know the one of me in the… with the plasma rifle and the boy band leather pants? I figured out where that’s from. The massacre of Schloorian Rift. You drew a pin-up of a triple genocide.”

He’s vaguely aware of the rise and fall of shoulders beside him.

“I like that picture.”

“Yeah and I bet you like the euphemism ‘Freedom Fighters’ for terrorists too.”

“You going to tell me you robbed and blew up an orphanage for victims of that massacre too?” Morty asks quietly, more than a trace of humor in his voice now.

Groaning, Rick rubs his face. That fucking hangover is trying to kick in early. Jesus he’s getting old.

“You know how this is going to end for you, Morty? A-A fucking best case scenario? You on your knees in a prison cell, puking your guts out from Bond Loss after my execution while your new cellmate gives you a crash course in Kevlorkian anatomy. This isn’t goddamn Romeo and Juliet. Or did you not make it that far into 9th grade?”

“Bonnie and Clyde then,” Morty says calmly. “We can go out in a hail of gunfire at the same time.”

“Clyde got shot in the head while Bonnie screamed before the cops even started to rip her apart one bullet at time,” Rick mutters, mercifully remembering the existence of his half-full flask as new and remembered images of Morty’s smiling body fill his head.

“Anyway,” he says, draining the last of the vodka, anger starting fill his chest, “It doesn’t really matter. You know why?”

Morty shakes his head.

Rick stares at the ceiling dully. “Ask me to break the bond.”

Morty stays silent.

“Go on, do it.”

The response is small and quiet. “I don’t want to.”

“You can ask me Morty, or you can get the fuck out of my room,” Rick grits out, chucking the empty flask at the pile of empties with more force than necessary, getting a small amount of pleasure out of the sound of metal on glass.

It takes a few moments, but Morty finally speaks up, phrasing his words carefully.

“Would you… would you break the bond, Rick?”

It’s a question, not a request, but Rick accepts it.

“No, Morty. I wouldn’t.”

He feels a flicker of joy and hope in the back of his skull, and tries to quash the foreign invaders as best he can.

“Ask me why not.”

The question comes more quickly this time, dutifully and eagerly tripping over Morty’s mostly-sober lips with ease.

“Why not, Rick?”

‘Well Morty, there’s a lot of possible reasons. The best one is one is probably because even though I can’t seem to break you of your stupid romantic notions about what this is going to be, breaking the bond would have some serious fucking consequences.”

Rick forces himself to sit up and meet Morty’s eyes, feeling the bond jerk taught a little as he does.

“Not for me, so much. I spent seventy years on my own, I could go back to it without serious harm, but you?” He reaches out and wraps a hand around Morty’s thin wrist, letting the full force of his honesty and intent flow through the bond.

Morty gasps, leaning into the grip even though it must feel like licking a live current.

“It would probably snap your mind like a twig. Leave you a hollowed out shell for years, maybe even the rest of your life, the same as if I died tomorrow.”

The boy’s breathing is heavier, but still damnably even as he stares up into Rick’s gaze, accepting the lecture with grace. Rick leans in for the kill.

“You’re-You’re a parasitic life-form, Morty. You can’t live without me, but I was fucking fine without you.”

There’s a small flicker of hurt at that through the bond, but it’s smoothed over with acceptance. The kid’s known that for a while now, been groomed for it by Beth and Jerry and his small experience with Rick.

“So why keep me?”

The words are small, quiet, and for a moment Rick isn’t even sure they were spoken aloud, and not just echoed through the bond. But no, Morty’s mouth is open now, and he seems to be waiting for an answer. And once again, Rick feels like he owes him some small amount of the truth.

Dropping his hand from Morty’s wrist he slides it along the boy’s cheek and through his hair, watching and cataloging the way the boy’s face goes slack as his thoughts start to slow and layer with new complex emotions and arousal.

“Because I’m a selfish fuck,” Rick admits. “Because I’m old and bored and I’ve been alone, and since the universe decided to saddle you with me I’m going to keep you. Because you’re new, and interesting, and I  _like_ the fact that I can’t drive you away, even if you end up wanting me to.”

Morty’s eyes finally fill with the tears Rick’s been trying to coax out all night, the emotions in the boy’s head a beehive of shock and other things that feel raw and sore. Rick opens the bond as wide as it will go, giving free access to the worst, darkest parts of himself he’s done his best to build walls around for weeks.

Leaning in, he whispers in the teen’s ear. “Because I don’t care enough that it’s going to ruin you, you’re fucking mine and I don’t have to do anything to keep you that way.”

Morty moves then, limbs flailing with panic and his head jerking away from Rick’s palm, and Rick lets him, closing his eyes for a moment as the whiskey and movement make the room spin, enjoying the quiet of the part of his brain that will reproach him for honesty if he remembers this in the morning.

But then there’s pressure against his mouth and hands on his sides under his coat, scrabbling for the bottom of his sweater, and as the bond slams open with the skin-to-skin contact again Rick realizes that Morty hadn’t been trying to get away from him, he’d been sliding under him for a better angle to launch this new assault of lips and hands.

Morty bucks his hips up against Rick’s crotch and they both groan at the feedback loop of arousal and sensation that courses through the bond, recurring and growing stronger as they both start to move in tandem.

Rick’s hands find their way into Morty’s hair and neck again as the teen manages to get his hands under Rick’s sweater and splays his fingers across Rick’s stomach and side, as if he’s trying to get as much skin-to-skin contact as physically possible with his petite grip and sheer determination. He kisses with theoretical knowledge but no practical experience, and Rick recognizes several of his own moves sloppily executed. He corrects Morty’s technique, and the boy moans, sending shivers down Rick’s spine for the way it sounds in his ears mingled with the fireworks it reflects in his head.

Rick’s aware of where this is heading, he’s not even sure if he could stop it now, barely remembers why he held off for so long.

This was always going to happen. He may as well enjoy it while he can.

Still, he manages to gasp out a few actual words, reminding Morty that while whiskey dick clearly doesn’t seem to be a problem right now, there’s a genuine chance he might not remember their first time in the morning.

Morty responds by yanking Rick’s belt off with enough force that the buckle cracks when it makes contact with the far wall.

The kid’s probably got the right idea. Who knows how long it would take him to do this sober.

Shoving aside reason, dubious ethics, and verbal speech for the remainder of the evening, Rick wraps his hands around the Morty’s waist and rolls onto his back, broadcasting a lust-filtered image of the sweat-drenched teen riding him with abandon.

_You’re the mostly sober one, Morty. Get up there._

Morty groans and freezes, pressing a palm hard against his crotch. Rick takes the credit his stamina helping to keep the boy from coming in his pants.

Not that that isn’t a thought for later.

 

* * *

 

_Morty rolls his hips again and a small, keening cry rips its way from his throat as Rick’s cock drags against his prostate again, but even that sound feels far away. All noise is the pounding in his ears and the crash of shared emotion in the bond; need, pleasure, possession, hunger, all cascading through his mind from Rick’s and being sent back with his own eager acceptance._

_Yes. Please. More. Yours._

_Rick grabs his wrist and uses it to haul himself up into a sitting position, wrapping his other arm around Morty’s back and grinding his hips into the teen with a growl. Morty doesn’t know if he wails or stays silent at the new stimulation, all of his attention is on Rick’s eyes, piercing into his with single-minded focus and intensity._

_After a moment Rick’s other hand goes to wrap around his back too, nails digging into his ribs as he easily picks Morty up and slams him down, no longer content to let him set the pace._

_Morty feels the cry form and travel over his lips that time as his eyes roll back in his head, his own hands flailing for Rick’s shoulders in a desperate grasp for something solid._

_Maybe Rick feels the same way, because he pulls him closer, letting Morty’s cock rub perfectly against his stomach as they move and burying his teeth into his bondmate’s shoulder._

_It’s perfect. It’s heaven. It’s primal and feral and Morty couldn’t tell you what his own name is, other than ‘Rick’s’._

_He feels the skin give way beneath Rick’s teeth like an apple, feels the blood drip down his shoulder in warm, thick droplets. He can taste the iron and salt tang through the bond, and it makes his mouth water._

_And then the pain hits as Rick tears away a chunk of his shoulder with a wet, tearing sound that should be sickening, should cause fear, or worry, or anything other the delight and throbbing arousal that it does send coursing through Morty’s nervous system._

_Rick pulls away and chews, his mouth a bloody maw as he stares at Morty with triumph. Morty leans in to try and kiss him, to try and snag a piece of that delightful taste firsthand, but Rick dodges him easily and leans in to bite him on the other side instead, latching on near the back of his neck this time._

_Rick’s nails dig deeper into Morty’s ribs this time, and he can swear they’re longer, sharper than they were a minute ago, gouging into him nearly to his heart and lungs. Rick’s teeth seem sharper too, but that’s just because they’re buried in his neck, right?_

_Rutting as furiously as he can against Rick’s stomach without upsetting the pace he's set, Morty leans in and tries to set his own teeth against Rick’s shoulder. He tastes sweat and skin, and moans against his mouthful as he feels Rick tear away with another prized piece of Morty’s flesh._

_Biting down as hard as he can, Morty can’t seem to make the slightest indentation. Rick feels like he’s made of leather, stretched over bone. Like the only flesh and blood within him is what he’s managed to claim from Morty. Digging his nails into Rick’s shoulders feels like he’s may as well be gripping sandpaper for dear life, ultimately destroying his fingers before he’ll make any progress at all._

_Morty finds his voice then, begging Rick to help him, admiring the no-longer human glint of Rick’s eyes and teeth in the low light. Obliging, Rick takes a single claw and draws a shallow line along his collarbone, splitting the skin like parchment and letting drops of dark blood to well to the surface._

_Nearly sobbing with gratitude, Morty presses his lips against the gash, eyes slipping closed as Rick’s hand returns to his waist and his pace quickens. Licking at the wound, Morty finds Rick's blood turns to ashes on his lips, his tongue. He does cry then, as Rick stills and comes, filling him from the inside near to bursting as his teeth come to rest on Morty’s neck again, just above his jugular-_

 

* * *

 

Rick snaps awake and lies still in the unfamiliar darkness. No, not unfamiliar, just his bedroom-née-closet in the early hours of the morning.

What’s unfamiliar, he recognizes, is the warm body curled against his, protesting his newfound consciousness with small displeased groans, and burrowing further into his body heat before slipping deeper into oblivion again.

Absently, Rick lets himself be used as a space heater and blanket, rubbing gently at Morty’s arm as he probes the new, final configuration of the bond.

According to the literature, which Rick trusts about as far as a sex-ed course in a red state, now that the bond is fully sealed, he should have more control over what Morty gets from him, and vice versa.

The skin-to-skin contact they’re sharing still makes the bond hum, but it’s less intense now. Rick can no longer fully ignore it, and isn’t _that_ wonderful to learn, but its effects feel muted, more settled.

Morty’s face twists in his sleep with discontent, and Rick automatically looks to see why.

It’s still the same dream. The one that had jolted Rick into consciousness.

But if Morty’s still having it after he wakes… that means it’s the first shared dream that hadn’t come from Rick’s subconscious, but Morty’s.

Pulling up a mixture of memories from opioid highs and soothing Beth to sleep as a baby (he’s really going to have to get better at this), Rick gently pokes and prods at the edges of Morty’s mind until he feels the dream give way and the wrinkles disappear from Morty’s forehead.

The kid’s fucked up nightmare boner is still there, and apparently so is Rick’s, but he’s had enough of that pile of issues for one night.

Gently easing out from under Morty, Rick climbs out of the cot and collects his clothes, slipping down to the garage. He needs some time alone. Looks like this is as close as he’s going to get.


	5. Active Phase

**Active Phase:** When the equilibrium of a pair of symbiotic stars is disturbed, significant change occurs in the radiation signature of the star system, and its brightness increases by several orders of magnitude. This brightness is caused by the energy created in the accretion disk formed in the matter transfer between the two stars, often outshining them both to become the sole visible point of brightness.

 

* * *

 

You could say Rick gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar on the next mission.

Except in this case the metaphorical cookie jar is actually more of a high-security Federation lab, and he gets caught holding weapons convoy deployment plans for the entire quadrant, so it’s more equivalent to getting caught with his dick in a blender.

Despite the overblown security measures there isn’t a single high-ranking officer within fifty light years of the facility, so until one arrives Rick gets to experience the nut-shocking joy of peons asking inane questions and shocking his nuts.

“How many in your battalion, Sanchez?”

“Listen,” Rick coughs, “You might not have gotten the memo, but I’m retired. Even considered moving to Florida, but that makes it less easy to annoy the relatives.”

“If that’s true, then why are you here?” the Gromflamite seethes, whapping Rick in the balls again with too many watts of juice to be fun without a safeword and way more drugs than he’s currently on.

Gritting his teeth, Rick swallows the sour taste of bile that rises in his throat.

“What can I tell you, have you seen the Galactic Economy these days? Everybody has to have a side-hustle. Isn’t fixing that your self-appointed job these days?”

Mouth-flaps rustling in anger, the drone Rick has nicknamed ‘Shocky’ tosses aside the cattle prod and peruses the rest of the options along the wall, muttering under its breath.

“Yeah well your egg-layer fertilizes with my piss too, buddy,” Rick calls back.

The shocks of pain have been moderately debilitating, but at least he’s been able to get this dumbfuck to broadcast them well enough to send a warning through the bond, making sure Morty’s ready to brace against them too.

The rest of his energy has gone towards sending detailed images of the lab’s layout and guard patrols, which given Morty’s current position a few dozen feet away should be enough…

Shrieks and gunfire start to rattle behind the interrogation room door, and Rick’s body floods with sympathetic adrenaline.

It’s hard to read emotions or thoughts under the chemical haze, but Rick does his best to send calm, rational energy through the bond, giving Morty as much access as he can to his decades of tactical experience and muscle memory.

Rick’s hands curl around a gun that isn’t there, and he tries hard not to pull on the restraints again in frustration. There’s nothing he can do in the next thirty seconds, and that’s likely all this will take, one way or another. The way they have him tied up and spread-eagled he can see his soul-mark, stretched above his head, and he shoves all thoughts about the possibility of the connection snapping, and the emptiness returning, into the darkest, dustiest corners of his mind.

That isn’t something the kid needs to see.

The noise grinds to a halt, and the drone picks up a plasma rifle and carefully taps on the door.

“Security, report. ...I said report, do you require medical assistance?”

“No,” Comes a muffled voice from the other side of the door. “We’re good.”

Shocky presses an appendage against the bio-reader and the door slides open. A pile of viscera and dismembered thoraxes collapse through the open door like an undercooked cherry souffle.

The drone takes a small step back in horror, but any reaction beyond that is silenced by a metal pole with the jagged end that shoots through the door to jam through its throat. Morty steps through, climbing over the squelching pile of torsos and antennae and pushing his improvised weapon further through with every step.

Shocky collapses to its knees, clawing at its throat and gurgling. Morty steps around the flailing limbs and plucks the remote to Rick’s restraints from its belt before turning away and pressing the button to release him.

Rick rolls his shoulders and nods at the metal pole skewering the spasming half-corpse on the floor.

“Morty, what the fuck is that?”

“Hm?” Morty says, glancing back. “Oh, I ran out of charge on the guns and had to hide in a supply closet. I think it’s part of an old mop.”

He turns back to Rick, practically beaming. Rick can feel the accomplishment, victory and pride coursing through his veins, amplified by the fact he can tell Rick is impressed and more than a little proud himself.

But still… those guards aren’t just dead, they’re ripped to pieces. And sure, insectoid physiology isn’t the strongest for close-quarters combat, they didn’t become the bureaucrats of the universe for nothing, but Morty looks like he practically pulverized a few of them in his push to get here.

And those are just the ones by the door. Rick hadn’t really been looking in his head the rest of the time, just focusing on transmitting as little pain and as clear a map as possible.

Is this still just Rick rubbing off on him? Or does the kid really have that much anger?

“Oh!” Morty smiles, pulling reaching behind him and pulling something out of his jeans. “Look what I found!”

Rick blinks. “The portal gun?” Morty nods with the excitement of a hyperactive puppy. There are fluid sacs in his hair.

“If you had the portal gun,” he says slowly, accepting it and wiping chunks of brain off the keys, “Why didn’t you just portal into this room and take out the one guy?”

Morty just blinks at that, looking confused before smiling again and shrugging it off.

“Honestly didn’t think of it. Shall we go?”

 

* * *

 

_Rick knows this battlefield. He’s been here before._

_He remembers the way the wind blows the smoke from the furnaces in the east over the dusty fields, covering the smell of today’s bloodshed with the ashes of yesterday’s carrion._

_The dust that swirls around his boots isn’t dust at all, just ash from a hundred rounds of soldiers carted off to the crematoriums. It coats today’s dead like it recognizes its fallen comrades, regrouping after a defeat. Or who knows, maybe it’s the ashes of the other side, piling on as a last indignity._

_The suns are red, even though they’re usually not on this planet. Just tinted through the haze in the atmosphere._

_Rick breathes through the bandana tied across his face. It used to keep sweat out of his eyes during solos on stage. Now it keeps the dead out of his lungs._

_Only one other remains standing. Rick’s fingers twitch by his holster as he approaches, cautiously moving around the figure to see its face._

_It’s Morty._

_Rick may be dressed in his old combat gear, but Morty looks like he just stepped through from Earth._

_Well, sort of._

_His t-shirt is stained and torn in so many places Rick can barely tell where his shirt ends and his arms begin. His jeans and shoes are red and black with gore and coated ash that clings to the grime. Ash catches in his the curled mess of his hair delicately, like snowflakes, and the red light of the yellow suns makes them glow._

_Rick drops his hand from his gun and checks him for damage. No wounds. No cuts, no holes, no broken bones… maybe not even severe bruising if Rick can clean him off._

_“Morty?” He calls softly._

_There’s no reply. Morty stares dead ahead, eyes vacant and empty._

_“Morty, can you hear me?”_

_Concerned, Rick kneels in the dust and takes Morty’s face gently in his hands, checking for signs of concussion or shock. As soon as he does though, Morty’s eyes snap to meet his, and Rick feels the bond snap open._

_“Yes, Rick. I’m fine.”_

_“Morty, what are you doing here,” Rick murmurs, wiping away the worst of the filth from his face. He only succeeds in smearing it around._

_Morty cocks his head, and looks confused._

_“I completed the mission. Are you not happy with it?”_

_“What mission?”_

_Rick can hear his words echoing in the back of his head, but they feel hollow. There’s no emotion, no secondary thoughts, no life to them._

_Gesturing to the field, Morty’s voice is calm and empty._

_“I eliminated all of the targets.”_

_Rick swallows, and tries not to look around._

_“Aren’t you happy, Rick?”_

_Morty doesn’t sound so empty now. He sounds upset. No, worse, he sounds suspicious._

_“Of course I am Morty, you were- you did a great job, buddy.”_

_The boy frowns, assessing Rick from his position kneeling in the mud. Rick hopes the bandana hiding most of his face offers some protection from the roiling nausea in his guts._

_“You don’t sound happy. I can hear you, you’re lying.”_

_Cursing a little under his breath, Rick climbs to his knees and forces himself to lay a hand on Morty’s shoulder, even though it makes his spine itch with horror._

_“I don’t know what you’re on about, kid. Time to go home, now, come on.”_

_Morty’s hand whips around his and squeezes with an inhuman grip. Rick can feel his bones give way and snap as his arm is jerked up behind his back. Before he can breathe he’s thrown chest-down on the ground, ash billowing from the impact as the air is knocked out of him with a huff._

_Rick ignores the sharp, wrenching pain in his shoulder as it’s dislocated, reaching for his gun, but his holster is empty._

_He feels the pressure of Morty’s knee on his spine, and the cold metal of the gun barrel against the bottom of his skull. The trained sniper’s kill spot._

_“You’re not my Rick.”_

_Morty squeezes the trigger._

 

* * *

 

The nice thing about spending most of your life on the road, living out of military barracks, tour buses, in safe-houses as intergalactic fugitives, is that you get very good at packing your shit to run in a hurry.

Rick tosses three bottles of liquor, an extra flask of portal fluid, and a case of wafer cookies in his duffel bag, looking around the garage for anything he’d missed. If not he can always just come back here some other night, or to some other dimension and swipe it.

He catches sight of something as he bends to zip up the bag. One of Morty’s sketchbooks, sitting on the boy’s usual perch on the workbench. It’s the green one he’s been working in lately, mostly full of pictures of Rick that are a little more realistic these days, but his latest interest is trying to draw the dreams they share.

Rick had nearly cracked his glass when Morty had casually dropped that little fact on them at dinner last week, but with a little poking the truth comes out.

Morty doesn’t remember most of his dreams. Even the ones he does are blurry and fragmented, and he only gets to keep bits and pieces, even now. Rick just chalks it up to a childhood of practiced trauma blocking and counts his blessings.

Still, the urge to take it is strong. Something to remember why he’s leaving as well as what. Or even better… Rick shoulders his bag and heads inside to his room. Morty’s medical file is shoved under the cot somewhere. If he knows the kid at all, he’ll go digging through every single piece of Rick’s shit until he finds it, and that is a level of detail Rick really doesn’t need to unleash on him.

Maybe he’ll chuck it in a black hole. Or frame it as a monument to his failings. Either way it’s coming with him.

It takes a few minutes of shuffling through empties and dirty towels (god he’s going to miss the sex), but Rick eventually sits up, triumphantly shoving the thick manila folder in his coat. Now all he has to do is make it down the stairs and to the ship without-

“Rick?”

Fuck.

Morty stands in the doorway, looking far too awake and aware. Rick stands up, tossing the duffel back on his shoulder and grinning.

“Hey, Morty. Get back to bed, I don’t need your help on this one. It’s a cake walk.”

“You’re leaving,” Morty says. “Without me.”

Rick really wished he’d gotten better at lying with the bond. Still, that’s one of the many reasons he has to go.

“Yeah,” he says, abandoning all pretense. “I’m leaving.”

“Why?”

“Because Morty,” he sighs, “I’ve done all I can do here. I’m finished.”

The calm, muted anger that’s been oozing from Morty cracks, and piercing hot anger and betrayal burst through. It feels like literal red-hot knives, and Rick hates it, but not as much as he hates the look on Morty’s face.

“How can you say that,” The boy’s voice is half an octave too high, Rick can feel the tight, hot pull of imminent tears pulling at his own larynx. “How can you just abandon me?”

“I did it to your mom and your grandmother, Morty, it’s not exactly a new move,” Rick shrugs.

“Fuck you, Rick!” Morty shouts, shoving him in the chest. Rick doesn’t move an inch. “You fucking promised me, you made- you made me ask and then you promised me…”

“I promised you I wouldn’t break the bond,” Rick replies, swallowing a lump in his throat that must be Morty’s. “This is for the best. The bond’s stable now, you’ll… you’ll be fine. Better.”

“Better?” The teen yells, looking like he wants to shove Rick again. “Sneaking off in the middle of the night after you… after you…”

_You said you loved me._

Rick hears it, and doesn’t respond. Doesn’t make it real. He’s never said it out loud, probably never will, but fuck, if there has to be upsides to this goddamn telepathic bond one of them is that he didn’t have to.

Who knew that would bite him in the ass, except everybody?

“You’re a fucking coward, Rick,” Morty says quietly, rubbing away tears like he’s angry to waste them. “Who won’t take responsibility for your goddamn actions.”

“You wanna talk about responsibility, Morty?” Rick says. “Fine.”

He pulls Morty’s file from his coat and tosses it on the cot beside the boy.

“Read that and tell me I haven’t done more harm than good.”

Still glaring, Morty picks up the folder and skims through the first page, slowing down as he goes to read more.

Rick pulls out his flask and downs it angrily, unsure why he hasn’t just whipped out the portal gun and left while Morty’s distracted.

After far too short a time Morty pages through the folder, and tosses it down, shrugging.

“Not too much in there I hadn’t figured out on my own. Is this why you’ve stuck around this long? Trying to- to _fix_ me?”

“Look,” Rick snaps, “I’m not saying it’s my fault we ended up with some bullshit neurochemical bond, but I think it’s fair to say I’ve done my best to- to mitigate the worst of it. And if I stick around it’s just going to end badly.”

Morty laughs. “First of all, you take responsibility for war crimes to prove a point, but warping one teenage boy is your limit? Seriously?”

Rick pulls a face and a swig of vodka. It’s different, though he doesn’t really want to get into why. He’s chosen to commit a lot of dubious and horrible acts in his life, but what he’s done to the kid… it’s both unintentional and entirely because of who he is as a person.

“Secondly,” Morty says more quietly, sending nervous hope and affection sloppily through the bond, “You can’t know it’ll end badly unless you stick around to see the end.”

Rick sighs, and drops the duffel bag, moving over to wrap Morty in a hug that has the boy finally collapsing into tears.

“The problem is, Morty… That’s exactly where you’re wrong.”

 

* * *

 

Rick S-491 pushes his way through the double doors of ‘Regular Rick’s’, a bar that managed to pinpoint itself exactly within walking distance of the saddest parts of the Citadel. Equidistant from Mortytown, the factory and warehousing district, and the more rundown, barely hanging-on retail sectors, ‘He’s a Regular’ has become code for a certain kind of bar-goer.

Patrons of Regular Ricks don’t come for anything but a place to sit and drink in silence at a moderate price, acceptable on shit wages. The bar itself hasn’t been updated since it was built, designed to look more than its age, a rundown dive bar that kept the floors clean, changed the oil in the deep fat fryers once a month, and kicked anyone who started a fight or a scam down the street to a more disreputable location.

But S-491 isn’t there for a $7 belt of decent scotch and the sound of pool being played in intense, concentrated silence. Taking a seat at the bar in silence, he waits for the bartender to give him the time of day. In this place, seniority dictates who gets served first, not flash or cash. Regulars get attention while new guys have to wait.

Rick’s arm itches, and he rubs it through his sweater, despite the fact he’s certain it’s a phantom sensation. Just his own discomfort with the newly acquired mark that’s spread its way over his arm like an elaborate melanoma, growing more distinct by the day. It’s been a year to the day since he noticed the fucking thing, and it’s been the bane of his existence ever since.

The bartender finally gets to him, and Rick issues an order for two fingers of scotch and an identification.

“I’m looking for Barfly Rick.”

Grunting, the Rick behind the counter just pours him his drink and jerks his head to the end of the bar.

Rick takes it and walks down to the lone Rick on the end.

“Are you Barfly Rick?”

The Rick occupying the stool at the end of the bar looks like he owns it, by sheer right of settling into it for so long it has melded to his shape. He’s a little unkempt, his five o’clock shadow clearly from yesterday evening, not today, and his dingy brown leather jacket blends into the dim lighting of the bar like the finest furniture.

“Also known as Rick S-464,” he says, raising his glass in a mock toast. “Nice to meet ya, I’m going to guess… S-482? No, 483.”

“S-491,” Rick introduces himself, waving down the bartender to get his new ‘friend’ another. The bartender jumps immediately. Clearly S-464 is priority numero uno around here.

“Shit, we’re into the nineties already?” The Barfly mutters, rubbing the back of his neck. He stretches out of his default slump over the counter and cracks his back, turning to assess Rick up and down.

There’s a bit of a mischievous, Byronic-drunk glint in his eye, and Rick can kind of see the appeal.

“Sorry bud,” The Rick chuckles, reading his mind. “I don’t go for other Ricks.”

“No,” S-491 respond, eyeing his forearm. “I’m guessing not.”

The barfly snorts, taking a swig of his new drink and nodding in appreciation. “So who sent you my way, was it S-437? No, S-445, right?”

“I got my mark a year ago,” Rick deflects, intent on telling his fucked up story his own way, even if the man next to him seems to have heard it a dozen times before.

The Rick nods. “Condolences.”

“So I did what I assume all the other Ricks in my, in _our_ shoes did. I went and played tourist.”

The central finite curve is organized in a complicated and often annoying way, but for the most part, categories are ranked chronologically. The events of universe A-100 will take place before the events of A-110, by a couple of weeks usually, and a month at the most, but will be just about more or less identical, compared to universe B-100 or X-999.

So when a problem occurs for a Rick, and you want to take the lazy, well-informed way out, the easiest thing to do is go check out a universe that falls just a little behind yours on the order of events. Unless you’re a number lower than 125 or so. Then you’re usually just fucked from lack of time and data.

“So where’d you start?” S-464 asks. “Early four-fifties? Late four-thirties?”

“I started with the first ones I could find,” Rick says flatly. “S-407.”

The Barfly winces in sympathy. “Fuck.”

Rick drains the rest of his glass in remembrance. “Yeah. It was pretty fucking awful.”

“Rick S-425 actually killed both S-403s, it’s not an uncommon reaction.”

Another signal to the bartender. This time the bottle is left behind with a hefty tip slapped on the counter.

“Is it that the mark comes in earlier,” Rick asks, “Or is it something we do?”

S-464 is quiet for a moment, contemplating the bottom of his glass.

“A little of both, really. The mark comes in early for all of them, but there’s not more than six months of variation I’ve seen.”

“Six months is a long time to a kid.”

“Yeah,” Barfly sighs. “It should feel shorter for us, right?”

S-491 feels a familiar sense of dread start to pool in his stomach. “What’s the other part?”

“From what I’ve seen, the best indicator of your chances depend on how long you can hold out. Some don’t wait a week after the mark comes in clearly, did you meet S-413?”

“That fucking pervert scumbag? I’ve had the displeasure, yeah.”

Nodding, the Barfly refills their glasses. “Most make it around a year. I’m guessing that’s why you’re here now.”

“What’s the record?”

The Barfly grins, and lazily throws his arms out dramatically. “You’re lookin’ at him.”

Rick eyes him suspiciously. “And how’s that working out for you?”

The grin doesn’t vanish, but it flickers, and when it comes back it seems a little hollow.

“You got a hobby, 491?”

He shrugs. “Every Rick’s got a hobby or twelve, nothing weird though. Why?”

“Every day or two,” The Barfly explains, “A Morty stumbles through that door. Most of them are from Mortytown, Academy washouts. Poor Rickless bastards, desperate for a drink, and even more desperate for validation from a Rick, any Rick.”

S-491 drains the last of the bottle into his rocks glass and leans back against the bar, suspicions and bullshit meters on high alert. There was never any chance he’d get information out of an old drunk of any type without having to listen to a rambling pointless story.

“A good chunk of these Mortys are in love with their Ricks, right? And more than few of their Ricks aren’t interested in their attentions.” S-464 chuckles. “You came to me for one specialty, but there’s more than one urban legend floating around the Citadel about me. Mortys call me the Love-Tester Rick.”

The bartender seems to have abandoned their corner in Rick’s hour of need.

“So a Morty stumbles in here, thinking they’re being all subtle and casual, and hops up next to me on the bar. And he starts to ask me about my story. They’re romantic little twerps, Mortys. Especially for teenage boys, and damn if they don’t love the idea of a soulmate universe.”

S-491 can’t help himself, he laughs harshly, and after a split second of grinning S-464 joins him.

They light up a corner of the dingy, dark bar with their shared, bitter humor, true brothers-in-arms in a sea of versions of themselves that just don’t quite understand. It’s almost a solid minute before their vitriolic laughter calms, and S-464 waves over a new bottle and pours it out for a toast. In a significantly better humor, S-491 accepts it, and motions for the other Rick to continue his story.

“I tell the kid _all_ about my universe,” the barfly continues, “About how I spent so many decades alone, convinced I didn’t need a soulmate. About the life I lived on my own, until one day...” He tugs up the sleeve of his jacket, “...I got a mark.”

The Rick pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers one to S-491. He accepts it and the lighter as the Barfly continues his story.

“And then I tell them about how I joined the Citadel… and I met a boy named Morty Smith for the first time. And I realized that in my dimension, I never had a Morty.”

Rick drops the lighter and there’s a natural lull as they let the haze of nicotine and whiskey dull the room, both lost in their own heads for a moment.

“So I stayed,” S-464 says abruptly. “I got a place and a job on the Citadel, because there’s a chance that any one of 54% of the population could be the one.”

“And that’s the test,” Rick says, snorting in comprehension. “Each Morty wants to prove that they’re _the one_.”

The Barfly nods, grinning that charismatic grin at the bottom his glass.

“Any of them ever figure it out?” Rick asks, stubbing out his cigarette. “That there’s no such possible thing as interdimensional soulmates?”

S-464 shrugs. “People believe what they want to believe.” He holds up a his glass for a refill.

“Besides. A Rick’s gotta have a hobby.”

 

* * *

 

Morty’s mood is all over the place the next day, and Rick isn’t helping, sending complicated messages of ‘relax, trust me’ underlaid with dread and distaste.

Rick had agreed not to leave while Morty slept, but he had refused to make any promises beyond that. The teen had spend the night in a restless, half-sleep, jerking awake at every sound to reach out, making sure Rick hadn’t broken his promise, and letting the reassurance of the bond and the smell of Rick lull him back to sleep.

The next morning Rick had shoved an apple at him and urged him through a portal in lieu of breakfast. He’s relieved to see it’s just the Citadel on the other end, nowhere he’s likely to have to run or fight for his life on little sleep, but his anxiety mounts again as they head into the worst parts of the city.

His heart is nearly in his throat when they pass a rickety rod iron fence with a sign declaring it _Mistress Erica’s Home for Abandoned Mortys_ , but Rick puts a hand on his shoulder and guides him firmly past it.

Any and all expectations of what’s going on vanish by the time they stop in front of a bar at ten in the morning, while the sign out front assures them that they’ve been open for hours.

Rick guides them to a spot at the end of the bar, where a Rick sits that-

“Oh, it’s you!” Morty blurts out, recognizing the Rick from the bookstore.

The Rick turns and grins. “Hey, Morty S-491, right? Told you I’d see you around.”

“This is Rick S-464,” His Rick introduces them, sounding like he’s having to speak through gritted teeth the whole time. “Also known as-”

“Love-Tester Rick,” The stranger interrupts smoothly, winking at Morty as he stands and motions for the bartender.

“I’ll get us a booth,” Morty’s Rick mutters, heading for the back. “Morty, make sure he doesn’t order anything more than fifty dollars.”

S-464 pulls a face. “Spoilsport.” He peruses the back wall for a moment, before addressing the bartender. “I’ll take a bottle of mid-grade house rotgut, and a bottle of Stoli for the Morty.”

The bartender eyes Morty suspiciously, and he suddenly realizes he has no idea about the drinking laws on the Citadel. He should have taken that pamphlet.

“I don’t wanna clean up Morty puke before lunch.”

“Trust me,” Love-Tester Rick smiles, “This Morty shares a bloodstream with a Rick, he’ll be fine.”

A few minutes later they all pile into a corner booth, and both the Ricks pour down three fingers of scotch immediately. Morty eyes his vodka dubiously.

“I don’t really know if I want-”

“Drink, Morty.”

Grumbling that the least Rick could have done was let him eat something this morning, Morty pours a double shot and downs it, curious to see where this goes. He leans against his Rick for support, smiling a little as the scotch and vodka combo starts to warm his system.

Rick S-464 watches them from across the table, smiling a little wistfully.

“You’re a lucky prick, S-491.”

“Fuck me, buddy. I need you to talk to him.”

“Oh yeah?” That smile becomes a little more malicious. “Why should I do your dirty work for you?”

“That’s your fucking job, isn’t it? Pay for your booze.”

The other Rick laughs shortly. “The booze is an entrance fee, bub, it doesn’t entitle you to my life story.”

“Fine.” Rick pulls a roll of bills from his pocket and chucks it across the table. S-464 catches it easily. “But only because he isn’t getting it from me.”

Examining and then pocketing the money, the Rick snorts a little with amusement.

“Yeah, sounds familiar.”

Morty watches the exchange curiously, letting the liquor settle. The strange Rick pours a new round for all of them, which he accepts after watching his bondmate toss his back like he’s dying of thirst.

“All right, might as well get started then,” S-464 says, grinning again. “Morty, my literal specialty is being the life coach of the utterly fucked, S-400 Ricks and Mortys, aka those who are unlucky enough to get soulmate bonds.”

Morty listens, a little unimpressed. “And what makes you the expert then?”

The Rick shrugs lightheartedly. “Less of an expert, more of a poster boy? The unofficial welcome wagon slash oracle of things to come.”

Morty’s Rick speaks, tense against his side.

“We’re here so he can tell you what happened to his Morty.”

S-464’s smile vanishes.


	6. Quiescent Phase

**Quiescent Phase:** When the accretion, mass-loss, and ionization processes are in equilibrium between Symbiotic Stars, the star system will continue to release energy at an approximately constant rate.

 

* * *

 

“How much does he know?” S-464 asks.

Rick scoffs. “What, about you, or about us in general?”

“I know plenty,” Morty interrupts, scowling a little at the both of them. “I’ve seen my medical file, Rick showed it to me. I know about the- the EBS and the complications because Rick’s…”

“Five times your age and quarter of your genetic make-up?” The Barfly fills in wryly, nodding a little. “I’m impressed S-491, that’s more than most Ricks cough up.”

“Yeah well, transparency’s never really been our thing.”

“You also know that your grandpa’s not a good man, right Morty?” The Rick asks seriously. “None of us are really, to varying degrees.”

Morty looks like he’s about to protest, but he must read the tone of the room and the deadly seriousness Rick’s projecting through the bond, because eventually he nods tersely, reaching for the vodka bottle of his own accord.

“It took a while for Rick to come find you after you got your mark, didn’t it?”

“Exactly two years, three months,” Rick interjects smugly, “And two weeks.”

The Barfly snorts. “Competitive show-off, but still impressive. I’ll drink to being beaten.”

Two rounds of scotch and a round of vodka go down the hatch, the tension on the room palpable but held at bay by the etiquette of group drinking. There’s a moment of quiet at the table as S-464 gathers his thought, trying to balance delicacy with brutal truth.

“The first Ricks didn’t wait,” he starts. “Their Mortys were young, way too young. Twelve, thirteen years old, and so in love…” He stares at Morty. “It’s never easier to manipulate someone than when they’re in love. Love makes you desperate. And desperate people will do anything.”

“A few of the Ricks and Mortys ended up giving into Bond Madness,” he continues, “The Ricks made an impulsive decision and some paid for it with their sanity or their lives. But they were the fortunate few.”

Morty stares back, his nerves only betraying him to an outsider by the way he fidgets with his shot glass.

“What about the others?” He asks, right on cue. Rick has to hand it to the Barfly, he knows how to tell a story to lure in a sucker.

“Their Ricks turned them into sex slaves. Or weapons. Sometimes both. Sometimes consciously, sometimes before they knew what they were doing.”

Morty turns to look at Rick, shocked recognition pouring over his face, as snippets of shared dreams and nightmares being sent through the bond with new inquiries attached.

“Yeah, I saw some of it,” Rick nods. “Most of those aren’t direct memories though, just good old fashioned nightmares.”

Morty leans in and laces his fingers through Rick’s non-drinking hand, squeezing tightly as they have a quiet exchange of emotion. S-464 seems to recognize what’s going on, because he waits a moment before resuming.

“The worst ones got turned into something even more miserable. Pale imitations of Ricks, with all the worst traits and none of the redeeming ones.”

“If we have redeeming ones.” Rick chimes in with the easy punchline, and another round goes down for both Ricks in a ‘cheers to that’.

“Which were you?” Morty asks quietly.

S-464 runs his hand through his hair and sighs at the tabletop. “I was the one who was going to do it differently.”

He seems to need a moment to collect his thoughts again, and Rick and Morty wait. Morty never loosens his grip on Rick’s knuckles.

“My Morty was in the same bad spot as most,” the Barfly resumes abruptly, “Too young, too influenced, too fucked from partying and cheap booze. But like a lot of Ricks, I’d done my homework.

“The theory is that if you cement the bond too early, the non-dominant partner never gets to develop as an individual. So I figured fuck, let’s give the kid a real shot, yeah?”

The Rick looks wistful for a moment. “Ricks are cocky fucks, you know. You spend half a century or more doing every drug you can get your hands on or invent, you start to think you’re immune to really good new highs.”

“You wanna know a secret, Morty?” S-464 winks conspiratorially. “He’ll never tell you this but I bet you can read him. Bonding is the best fucking high, even if you only get it once. It’s like your first time on MDMA meeting your best Acid Epiphany, and it doesn’t ever totally fade. It soothes all the empty parts of you that you didn’t realize were hurting, and lights up new parts you didn’t know existed. Like finding a whole ‘nother house through a secret door in the room you grew up in.”

Rick can feel Morty rooting around in his head a little, curious and a little smug. He lets the kid have a bone, opening up his memories of all his favorite highs and offering easy comparison to the kid’s own experience of bonding. He still shoots a dirty look at the Barfly though. There are principles.

“So you folded like a flimsy house of hards immediately then,” Rick supplies, gently nudging Morty out of his head and back to the matter at hand.

“Oh yeah, big time,” S-464 supplies cheerfully, leaning back against the booth, his eyes shining with humor at the dopey look on Morty’s face. “Kissed him within a minute of laying eyes on him.”

There’s a little stab of jealousy from Morty at that admission, and Rick does not like that shit at all.

“So what happened after you tongued the pre-teen?”

The Barfly snorts, accepting the shot as his due. He fishes a battered pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, lighting up and taking long, lascivious drag at the memory before responding.

“I made myself take my fucking hands off and I didn’t put them back for weeks.”

“Because you wanted him to be ready?” Morty asks.

The Barfly nods, “And because I was scared shitless of ending up like one of the Ricks I’d seen too. And yet here I am,” he gestures to himself lazily with the lit cigarette, “A paid cautionary tale.”

“What happened then?” Morty pushes, apparently eager for the end of a story he’s been guaranteed has no happy ending.

“We moved to the Citadel,” S-464 says, “Official full-timers. I had this idea, right? That if he had never had a chance to figure out who he was, who he was supposed to be, here he’d get an idea of a template. Plus, Mortys here… they tend to develop as individuals faster.” He grins at Rick. “Who better to teach you who you are and who you don’t want to be than a hundred other versions of yourself.”

Morty sits quietly, considering for a moment.

“It’s a good plan. What went wrong?”

“I forgot one very important variable,” S-464 says, pouring the last of the scotch into his glass as Rick glares at him.

“Which is?”

He grins, raising his glass in salute at his counterpart before he downs it. “That other Ricks are assholes.”

“He didn’t just see other Mortys on the Citadel,” Morty says slowly, piecing it together. “He saw other Ricks.”

“More specifically he saw other Ricks and Mortys together,” The Barfly nods. “Eventually a certain percentage of Ricks that aren’t from our little corner of the multiverse started up relationships with their Mortys, and that spiraled into a bit of a fad as Mortys across the Citadel started to become even more aggressively horny little shits.”

Rick waves over a new bottle of whiskey, stealing a shot of his Soulmate’s vodka while the boy seems lost in thought. “So he saw other Ricks and Mortys together, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t have what everyone else was having.”

“Pretty much,” S-464 shrugs, beaming at the new bottle on its way. “I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to explain it to him, obviously.”

“There are Ricks and Mortys in relationships that are- that don’t have…” Morty sighs in annoyance at himself and spits out the lingering taboo. “That are unmarked and are together. And you… what? You didn’t finalize the bond?”

“I wish I had only been that stupid,” The Barfly mutters. “I didn’t even touch him. Barely talked to him. Tried to keep out of his way as much as possible.”

“Fuck you.”

Three sets of identical eyes land on Morty. Rick, S-464, and the bartender, who sets down the whiskey and fucks off a little too slowly for the table’s liking, a snicker escaping the corner of his mouth.”

Rick S-464 looks amused, but only just. “Fuck me, buddy.”

Rick can feel the thinly veiled rage and empathetic sorrow oozing through the bond. Morty’s fists are clenched tight in his lap as he keeps thinking about those first weeks when Rick got here, when he threw him out of his room and refused to even speak to him.

“I can’t imagine,” Morty says quietly, “Having a bond, and having to- having to see other versions of me that- that _don’t_ but are happier.”

The Ricks share another knowing glance across the table.

“Morty, soulmate bonds are… not a good thing. They’re just a quirk of a few universes that’ve been fetishized for the sanity of the masses.”

Morty’s face is as calm as a religious zealot on a battlefield. “I refuse to believe that.”

Rick can feel the conversation teetering on the edge of an argument he’s been trying to circumvent yet again, and this time he’s the one who nudges the Barfly under the table to continue.

“He was doing well, the first couple months,” the other Rick continues, “His grades went up under the Morty school, he made some twerpy little friends, even got a part-time job at that snooty coffee shop chain that’s popping all over the Citadel.”

It would take an expert in a Rick’s tones to recognize the defensiveness in the statement and the slant of his shoulders. Sucks for him, two were sitting right across the table.

“We started getting into fights,” S-464 continues, a small quirk at the corner of his mouth that shouldn’t usually accompany such a statement. Rick remembers his own sense of pride and accomplishment when Morty had started to grow a spine.

Speaking of which, Morty looks like he still wants to argue, to steamroll over this resuming of the story and pick up those fights in the place of his counterpart, and Rick not-so-subtly distracts him with a shift of his leg against the teen’s and an ‘accidental’ flash of the thought of fucking him in the bar’s bathroom.

Not exactly the theme of tonight’s party, but it does its job. Morty’s face loses some of its tension, and the bond grows a little slack, tension and indignation giving way for idle fantasies.

“He started flirting at work with every Rick that would give him the time of day, and the little shit wasn’t shy about letting me know about it.” The Barfly snorts, running a hand through his hair.

“Coming home with phone numbers drawn on his arm next to my name, letting me see him with Ricks with their hands all over him when I came by, just doing everything he could to show me how hap- how he was flattered by the attention. Trying to get me to crack.” S-464 shakes his head, “Jesus Christ, the fucking dreams…”

Rick barks out a laugh unexpectedly. “Sounds familiar.”

Shit, he must be a little drunker than he thought. He forgot even the crappy bars serve the strong shit over here. Even Morty’s looking pinker in the cheeks than usual as he frowns half-heartedly at Rick.

“S-so did you?” Morty asks, and yup, there’s a definite slight unsteadiness in his seat as he throws back another shot of vodka. Rick feels that complicated mass of pride and guilt that always accompanies Morty’s familial behaviors, but pride wins out, as it’s been doing more and more these days. “Crack, I mean.”

The Barfly watches the contractions of Morty’s throat with a little more interest than Rick likes.

“Yes and no. We eventually had the mother of all fights. Shouting, punching, making out against the wall like the fucking cops were at the door to haul us away any second.”

Morty’s head falls against Rick’s shoulder, his breathing a little uneven and alcohol-saturated colortone images of similar nights the last month, both real and imagined practically bombard him. Rick avoids the growing arousal in his own head, sectioning off Morty as best he can. This is not an erotic tale.

Or maybe it is. What was that saying? Erotica isn’t romance with kinkier sex, it’s just another genre of horror.

“I threw him out. Locked myself in my lab and jerked off like I was the emo fucking teenager, not the other way around.” The glass in front of S-464 is full but untouched, beads of condensation starting to roll down the sides. “I didn’t come out for hours. Not that I’d needed to, he must have left immediately.”

The lighter and the pack of cigarettes emerge from the bomber jacket, but the Barfly doesn’t do anything besides pull one out and knock it against the table, rolling it against his fingers in a bid for time. It’s always possible it’s cultivated for dramatic effect, but Rick knows as well as anyone, there’s some stories that don’t stop digging their spurs into your ribs, no matter how many time you tell them.

“I don’t know where he met him,” he resumes quietly. “Maybe at the coffee shop, maybe that night at a bar. All I know is that less than three hours after I slammed the door in his face, he was on the other side of the Citadel, moaning face-down into a mattress while some sleazy piece of Rick-Trash fucked him.”

Morty’s arms come to wrap around Rick’s waist as he listens. Rick lets him, dropping his own arm around the boy’s shoulders.

“I don’t know if it was intentional, trying to make me jealous or just because he couldn’t control it, but I felt every single second,” the Barfly says. His voice has lost all hints of defensiveness, or humor, even regret. He recites the story with a flat intonation, rolling a cigarette between his fingers and knocking it against the table as punctuation.

“I felt the shock of arousal and pleasure from the first time he ever got his dick sucked, the way his brain lit up like a Christmas tree and he nearly screamed when that shit-stain found his prostate, the way he moaned my name, and let me _know_ he meant it just for me...”

S-464 seems to snap out of his reverie, taking a deep inhale through his nose and finally lighting his cigarette. He brings it to his lips for a long, steadying drag before lets it out, dropping the lighter back in his jacket pocket.

“I was locked in my lab with my hand around my dick, jerking off like a goddamn Jerry with a cuckholding fetish when the Rick snapped his neck.”

Shock and horror pours through the bond from Morty like ice water, and Rick almost winces visibly along with him.

The Barfly grimaces sympathetically, nodding at the boy. “Yeah. I felt that too.”

“I-I-I...I don’t…” Morty’s stammer rears its head hard for the first time in weeks. “Don’t t-tell me anymore… about that.”

Rick squeezes Morty’s shoulder, reminding himself that this is why they were here.

“Okay,” The other Rick says, almost soothingly, nodding a little. “I don’t really wanna get into it either. So I’ll just cut to the fucking chase and tell you the moral to this little story, yeah?”

He takes another long drag on his cigarette and crushes it into the tabletop, waiting for Morty to meet his gaze. It takes a moment.

“I told him what every S-400 Rick has had to figure out at some point in their miserable lives. That it doesn’t matter what you do, shit’s always going to end poorly. So the only way to win? Is not to play.”

Morty opens his mouth, probably to protest again, but it looks like words have failed him entirely. S-464 gives him a chance though, fishing out another cigarette and lighting it without ceremony this time. He doesn’t offer Rick one. Selfish prick.

“But Ricks won’t ever do that,” The Barfly continues, “Even the so-called ‘good’ Ricks. Because we’re selfish fucks, and addicts, and eventually we all cave.”

His gaze shifts from Morty over to Rick, cigarette dangling infuriatingly from the corner of his mouth as that god-awful stupid grin crawls back to squat on its usual spot on his face.

“You can hold out a year, or even two, but it doesn’t matter. You’re going to cave. And you might as well enjoy the high, because the comedown is like no other.”

There’s a tense silence at the table for a moment, eventually punctuated by S-464 stubbing his second cigarette out on the table and stretching obviously.

“Well, unless you’ve got any questions, I think my usual spot is calling me. There’s a particularly cute little Morty that’s been trying to catch my eye for the last-”

“I have a question.” Morty’s voice is back, quieter than usual but clear and determined.

The Barfly looks a little thrown, but he settles back into his chair and nods for the boy to continue.

“The Rick, one who killed your Morty, did they catch him?”

Rick S-464 looks at his counterpart, silently seeking a sign on what to tell him.

Rick steps in. “The Citadel… the Council of Ricks doesn’t really want to get involved in… interpersonal-”

The Barfly interrupts him this time, with a hand and a terse “I’ve got this.” Rick shrugs and sits back. The man may be an asshole, but after this, he deserves a small win.

Clearing his throat a little, the Rick answers. “Yeah. I found him.”

“And?” Morty asks.

S-464 stares the boy dead in the eyes. “I dragged him back to my lab and I left him hanging from the ceiling for seven straight weeks before he died.”

Morty’s eyes are hard as diamonds as he stares straight back.

“Good.”

 

* * *

 

The journey home is subdued, and more than a little drunk, with Morty stumbling after Rick through a portal outside the bar. Rick looks like he wants to protest when Morty follows him to his room, but exhaustion seems to win out.

It’s only been a handful of hours since he’d woken up really, but Morty feels like he’s been through a wringer. The conversation with Rick S-464 and the two plus hours Rick had made him spend drinking in silence after the other Rick had left, combined with the constant noise in his head that has nothing to do with the bond and entirely to do with his own confused emotions leaves Morty feeling like he’s run a marathon with a firing squad at his back.

Rick seems to feel the same way, though who knows how many days he’s been up. He shucks off his shoes, socks, sweater and pants, and crawls under the messy blanket on the cot. Morty follows suit, stripping down to his boxers and pushing his way against Rick, sandwiching his grandfather against the wall.

It feels strange to be the big spoon, and a little like he was intruding, literally clinging to Rick’s back, but nothing in the bond tells him Rick specifically wants him to fuck off. He tugs on the bottom of Rick’s wife-beater, sending a meek request through the bond. Rick grumbles a little but doesn’t move.

“Skin-to-skin contact helps,” Morty says quietly. “With the nightmares.”

It also helps stabilize his mood sometimes, even if it’s just to get a grip on what’s going on in his head versus what’s going on in Rick’s, but he doesn’t really feel like explaining that right now.

For whichever reason, Rick does lift a little and let Morty pull the tank over his head, and settle against his back, humming as the bond flares fully open.

There’s still a stubborn kernel of arousal clinging to Morty’s gut, whether from a Pavlovian reaction to this much physical contact and raging hormones, or a lingering ember from earlier, refusing to be doused by thoughts of his dead and exploited counterparts and clinging on in the form of sheer stress.

The teen shifts a little, embarrassed at the thought of poking Rick in the back with a half-chub.

“Hey Rick, If I-”

Rick cuts him off. “I wont let you try anything, Morty.”

The open-endedness of that statement nearly sends him into a tailspin, but Morty cuts himself off quickly before he floods the bond and pisses Rick off. Burying his face in the dip of Rick’s shoulderblades, he breathes his soulmate’s scent deeply and tries to let his exhaustion overtake him.

But the buzz in the back of his mind just grows as the alcohol starts to wear off, and sleep refuses to come. Morty just lies there, replaying the deluge of information he’s learned in the last few hours and trying to slot it into place with the last weeks, months, and years of his of life.

There’s no way to gage time in Rick’s room, he doesn’t keep clocks besides the watches along his arm, and Morty has no way of seeing those from here. The room itself has been soundproofed, and while Morty has had great reason to be grateful for that in the past, it now means he can’t hear if the family is home, moving about downstairs. The small cupboard feels like a jail cell, or a life pod, removed from time and the rest of reality, but with imminent problems lurking just outside.

Rick must be awake too though, Morty realizes, or else he’d probably be knocked the fuck out within seconds, although the noise of consciousness through the bond is quieter and more sober than he’s used to identifying.

In the heavy and near-silent space, filled only by two sets of synchronized breathing and the tick of half a dozen unsynchronized watches, Morty speaks into the small of Rick’s back.

“I’m sorry.”

There’s no audible or even physical response, but Morty can tell Rick heard him, thoughts leaping into action for analysis and defensive preparation. Sighing, he wraps his arms tighter against Rick, accepting that was as much comfort as he was going to get for a little while.

“I knew… some of that. And I kinda guessed at some of the other stuff, but I didn’t really...  I didn’t think about the potential risks, and that’s on me.”

Rick sighs, and rolls over, breaking Morty’s grip around his waist. Resignation pours heavily through the bond, but at least he seems willing to finally have this conversation. He props his head up against one hand and looks down at the teen lying beside him.

“You’re just a kid, Morty. It’s not- of course you didn’t realize all the shit that was likely to go wrong.”

“S-464 though,” Morty says slowly, “He tried. Almost all the Ricks at least tried.”

Rick doesn’t respond, apparently having nothing to add.

“I met a Morty in the bathroom at the bar,” the teen says, changing tacks. “He told me all about Love-Tester Rick.”

His grandfather snorts. “You warn him off?”

Morty chews his lip, and ignores the question, engrossed in his own train of thought.

“Is he… Is he doing the same thing that his Morty did?”

Rick’s brow furrorws in quizzical surprise. “How so?”

“Picking up random copies of his soulmate, seducing them and- and discarding them because they aren’t the one he really wants. That’s what his Morty did.”

A quiet huff of amusement comes from above Morty’s head, and he feels a tingle of pride move through the bond.

“That’s pretty- pretty uh, perceptive for a Morty. You’re probably right, he’s a pathetic old fuck.”

Morty frowns. “You don’t seem very sympathetic.”

“Why should I be?” Rick shrugs. “He’s a washed up old drunk that drove his Morty to self-destruct and is just waiting for someone to take him out too.”

He must noticably bristle at that, because Rick’s other hand lands on his arm almost casually.

“Why are you so chummy with him now? You were the one that told him to go fuck himself as soon as you learned what he did.” Irony of ironies, Morty can swear he feels jealousy coming from Rick. “You feel sorry for him now you’ve heard his polished sob story routine? H-he’s a parasite that thrives off romantic and stupid Mortys and other Ricks that are stuck in the same shitty niche as he is.”

Sitting up, Morty folds his legs under him and looks down at his soulmate in the dim light of the room.

“Rick, why did you take me there?”

Rick’s response is even, measured. “Because you weren’t listening to me when I tried to show you the risks. You needed to see the consequences of… what we are for yourself.”

A realization starts to prickle along the back of Morty’s neck, and he chooses his words carefully.

“What do you think the consequences are, Rick?”

Rick stares at him like he’s a moron, but Morty’s grown all but impervious to that by now. Besides, Rick had just admitted he was perceptive, and no amount of grumbling under his breath can rescind that now.

“You, ending up dead, a drooling empty shell, a weapon, or something worse.”

Vindication pours through Morty like liquid gold, and he grins, elated. Rick stares at him, now like he’s suddenly grown a second head and he’s more than a little concerned about what that means.

“So all the consequences are about me,” Morty says, slowly.

Rick says something back, but Morty’s ears don’t even register anything besides the sarcastic tone, he’s too busy trying not to throw his head back and laugh with delight at finally being the first to understand something.

He leans down to kiss Rick, and while the older man doesn’t kiss back beyond a simple press of the lips, the flare of affection that cuts through Rick’s suspicion solidifies everything in Morty’s chest.

“You took me there to see the effects of a bond gone wrong on a Morty,” he says patiently. “But what I saw were the effects on a Rick.”

Rick blinks, confused, and Morty does his best to share his newly gathered impressions.

_A Rick, glued to a barstool after a lifetime of galaxies and untold marvels._

_A Rick, emptied of ambition and drive after failing the project of lifetime still left him half-alive._

_A Rick, reliving the biggest regret of his life every day for cash to drink the memories dull again._

“I may have shit survival instincts when it comes to taking care of myself,” Morty says, smiling at his soulmate. “But I never considered the possibility, let alone the reality, that I have influence over you.”

Rick pulls him down silently, and wraps his arms around him tightly, pulling him against his chest.

“So how about,” Morty continues, his voice starting to waver a little with the shared emotion coursing through the bond, “You worry about consequences for me. And I’ll worry about taking care of you, deal?”

Rick doesn’t answer, burying his face in Morty’s hair as the boy curls around him as tightly as possible. Morty can hear and understand him through the bond, just fine, but he still pokes him gently in the ribs, wanting the concrete proof of an audible answer in the silence of their little chapel.

“Ow, Jesus, fine. Deal.” Rick mutters, his gruff tone betrayed by the tidal wave of affection and raw nerves that accompany it.

Morty buries himself deeper into Rick’s chest and lets the background noise of the bond wash over him like a gentle wave. The noise and emotion fill his head like white noise, and the heat from Rick’s body lull him towards sleep faster than he could have imagined possible.

One of Rick’s hands cradles the back of his head, irregularly carding loose fingers through his hair.

Just before the waves pull him under and sleep overtakes him, Morty swears he hears something.

“Fuck it. Maybe the ninety-first time is the charm.”

 

* * *

 

_Rick floats in the Darkness._

_No, not floats. He is a fixed point, a shining presence in the nothingness of the void as the light-show of the universe spins and dances around him, exploding and imploding in dazzling bursts of color; in the blink of eye, over the course of untold eons._

_He is not alone._

_There is an Other, but the Other is also within him. And he is within the Other._

_They do not exist within the same space, but they are fundamentally linked, like quantum-entangled particles._

_Rick watches galaxies rise and fall in the space of his own heartbeats, knows that trillions are born and live and die within them, great empires forming and crumbling into dust._

_And he feels so tiny._

_‘I know.’ Says the Other._

_He watches supernovae form one after the other, exploding like fireworks on the Fourth of July before fizzling into the dull glow of regular sequence stars, and he thinks it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen._

_‘Me too.’ Says the Other._

_He watches black holes consume the matter that had formed a thousand stars like it was nothing but dust, because it is. It always was._

_And he feels so insignificant._

_‘Not to me.’ Says the Other._

_And he takes comfort in that._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading and sticking with me through this story, especially those who commented! I love and appreciate you all.


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